UNIVERSITY  OF  CA  RIVERSIDE,  LIBRARY 


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LONDON 

BOOK  OF  ASPECTS 


ARTHUR  SYMONS 


IIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
RIVERSIDE 


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LONDON 

A  BOOK  OF  ASPECTS 


LONDON 


A  BOOK  OF  ASPECTS 


BY 


ARTHUR  SYMONS 


^ 


LONDON:    PRIVATELY   PRINTED    FOR 

EDMUND  D.  BROOKS  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 

MINNEAPOLIS 

1909 


S  9^ 


Entered  at  Stationers'  Hall 


CHISWICK  PRESS  :    CHARLES  WHITTINGHAM  AND  CO. 
TOOKS  COURT,  CHANCERY  LANE,  LONPON, 


Les  idees  sont  dans  I'air,  elles  vous  sourient 
au  coin  d'une  rue,  elles  s'^lancent  sous  una 
roue  de  cabriolet  avec  un  jet  de  boue. 

Balzac. 


LONDON:  A  BOOK  OF 

ASPECTS 

I 

THERE  is  in  the  aspect  of  London  a  certain 
magnificence:  the  magnificence  of  weight, 
solidity,  energy,  imperturbability,  and  an  un- 
conquered  continuance.  It  is  alive  from  border 
to  border,  not  an  inch  of  it  is  not  alive.  It  exists, 
goes  on,  and  has  been  going  on  for  so  many 
centuries.  Here  and  there  a  stone  or  the  line 
of  a  causeway  fixes  a  date.  If  you  look  beyond 
it  you  look  into  fog.  It  sums  up  and  includes 
England.  Materially  England  is  contained  in  it, 
and  the  soul  of  England  has  always  inhabited 
it  as  a  body.  We  have  not  had  a  great  man  who 
has  never  lived  in  London. 

And  London  makes  no  display;  it  is  there, 
as  it  has  come,  as  fire  and  plagues  have  left  it; 
but  it  has  never  had  either  a  Haussmann  or  a 
Nero.  It  has  none  of  the  straight  lines  of  Paris 
nor  the  tall  lines  of  Vienna  nor  the  emphatic 

I  B 


German  monotony.  It  has  not  the  natural  aids 
of  Constantinople,  with  seas  and  continents 
about  it,  nor  of  Rome,  with  its  seven  hills,  and 
its  traces  of  all  the  history  of  the  world.  It  was 
set  in  fertile  soil,  which  has  still  left  it  the 
marvellous  green  grass  of  its  parks,  and  on  a 
river  which  has  brought  beauty  along  its  whole 
course.  Great  architects  have  left  a  few  un- 
spoilt treasures:  Westminster  Abbey,  the  Ban- 
queting Hall  at  Whitehall,  an  old  church  here 
and  there.  But  for  the  most  part  the  appeal 
of  London  is  made  by  no  beauty  or  effect  in 
things  themselves,  but  by  the  sense  which  it 
gives  us  of  inevitable  growth  and  impregnable 
strength,  and  by  the  atmosphere  which  makes 
and  unmakes  this  vast  and  solid  city  every 
morning  and  every  evening  with  a  natural 
magic  peculiar  to  it. 

English  air,  working  upon  London  smoke, 
creates  the  real  London.  The  real  London  is 
notacity  of  uniform  brightness,  like  Paris,  nor 
of  savage  gloom,  like  Prague;  it  is  a  picture 
continually  changing,  a  continual  sequence  of 
pictures,  and  there  is  no  knowing  what  mean 
street  corner  may  not  suddenly  take  on  a  glory 
not  its  own.  The  English  mist  is  always  at 
work  like  a  subtle  painter,  and  London  is  a 
vast  canvas  prepared  for  the  mist  to  work  on. 


The  especial  beauty  of  London  is  the  Thames, 
and  the  Thames  is  so  wonderful  because  the 
mist  is  always  changing  its  shapes  and  colours, 
always  making  its  lights  mysterious,  and  build- 
ing palaces  of  cloud  out  of  mere  Parliament 
Houses  with  their  jags  and  turrets.  When 
the  mist  collaborates  with  night  and  rain,  the 
masterpiece  is  created. 

Most  travellers  come  into  London  across 
the  river,  sometimes  crossing  it  twice.  The 
entrance,  as  you  leave  the  country  behind  you, 
is  ominous.  If  you  come  by  night,  and  it  is 
never  wise  to  enter  any  city  except  by  night, 
you  are  slowly  swallowed  up  by  a  blank  of 
blackness,  pierced  by  holes  and  windows  of 
dingy  light;  foul  and  misty  eyes  of  light  in 
the  sky;  narrow  gulfs,  in  which  lights  blink; 
blocks  and  spikes  of  black  against  grey;  masts, 
as  it  were,  rising  out  of  a  sea  of  mist;  then  a 
whole  street  suddenly  laid  bare  in  bright  light; 
shoulders  of  dark  buildings;  and  then  black 
shiny  rails,  and  then  the  river,  a  vast  smudge, 
dismal  and  tragic;  and,  as  one  crosses  it 
again,  between  the  vast  network  of  the  bridge's 
bars,  the  impossible  fairy  peep-show  of  the 
Embankment. 

All  this  one  sees  in  passing,  in  hardly  more 
than  a  series  of  flashes;  but  if  you  would  see 

3 


London  steadily  from  the  point  where  its  as- 
pect is  finest,  go  on  a  night  when  there  has 
been  rain  to  the  footpath  which  crosses  Hun- 
gerford  Bridge  by  the  side  of  the  railway-track. 
The  river  seems  to  have  suddenly  become  a 
lake;  under  the  black  arches  of  Waterloo 
Bridge  there  are  reflections  of  golden  fire,  mul- 
tiplying arch  beyond  arch,  in  a  lovely  tangle. 
The  Surrey  side  is  dark,  with  tall  vague  build- 
ings rising  out  of  the  mud  on  which  a  little 
water  crawls:  is  it  the  water  that  moves  or  the 
shadows?  A  few  empty  barges  or  steamers  lie 
in  solid  patches  on  the  water  near  the  bank; 
and  a  stationary  sky-sign,  hideous  where  it  de- 
faces the  night,  turns  in  the  water  to  wavering 
bars  of  rosy  orange.  The  buildings  on  the 
Embankment  rise  up,  walls  of  soft  greyness 
with  squares  of  lighted  windows,  which  make 
patterns  across  them.  They  tremble  in  the  mist, 
their  shapes  flicker;  it  seems  as  if  a  breath 
would  blow  out  their  lights  and  leave  them 
bodiless  husks  in  the  wind.  From  one  of  the 
tallest  chimneys  a  reddish  smoke  floats  and 
twists  like  a  flag.  Below,  the  Embankment 
curves  towards  Cleopatra's  Needle:  you  see 
the  curve  of  the  wall,  as  the  lamps  light  it, 
leaving  the  obelisk  in  shadow,  and  falling 
faintly  on  the  grey  mud  in  the  river.  Just  that 

4 


corner  has  a  mysterious  air,  as  if  secluded,  in 
the  heart  of  a  pageant ;  I  know  not  what  makes 
it  quite  so  tragic  and  melancholy.  The  aspect 
of  the  night,  the  aspect  of  London,  pricked  out 
in  points  of  fire  against  an  enveloping  dark- 
ness, is  as  beautiful  as  any  sunset  or  any 
mountain  ;  I  do  not  know  any  more  beautiful 
aspect.  And  here,  as  always  in  London,  it  is 
the  atmosphere  that  makes  the  picture,  an  at- 
mosphere like  Turner,  revealing  every  form 
through  the  ecstasy  of  its  colour. 

It  is  not  only  on  the  river  that  London  can 
make  absolute  beauty  out  of  the  material  which 
lies  so  casually  about  in  its  streets.  A  London 
sunset,  seen  through  vistas  of  narrow  streets, 
has  a  colour  of  smoky  rose  which  can  be  seen 
in  no  other  city,  and  it  weaves  strange  splen- 
dours, often  enough,  on  its  edges  and  gulfs  of 
sky,  not  less  marvellous  than  Venice  can  lift 
over  the  Giudecca,  or  Siena  see  stretched  be- 
yond its  walls.  At  such  a  point  as  the  Marble 
Arch  you  may  see  conflagrations  of  jewels,  a 
sky  of  burning  lavender,  tossed  abroad  like  a 
crumpled  cloak,  with  broad  bands  of  dull  pur- 
ple and  smoky  pink,  slashed  with  bright  gold 
and  decked  with  grey  streamers;  you  see  it 
through  a  veil  of  moving  mist,  which  darkens 
downwards  to  a  solid  block,  coloured  like  lead, 

5 


where  the  lighted  road  turns,  meeting  the 
sky. 

And  there  are  a  few  open  spaces,  which  at 
all  times  and  under  all  lights  are  satisfying  to 
the  eyes.  Hyde  Park  Corner,  for  no  reason 
in  particular,  gives  one  the  first  sensation  of 
pleasure  as  one  comes  into  London  from  Vic- 
toria Station.  The  glimpse  of  the  two  parks, 
with  their  big  gates,  the  eager  flow  of  traffic, 
not  too  tangled  or  laborious  just  there,  the 
beginning  of  Piccadilly,  the  lack  of  stiffness 
in  anything:  is  it  these  that  help  to  make  up 
the  impression?  Piccadilly  Circus  is  always 
like  a  queer  hive,  and  is  at  least  never  dead  or 
formal.  But  it  is  Trafalgar  Square  which  is 
the  conscious  heart  or  centre  of  London. 

If  the  Thames  is  the  soul  of  London,  and  if 
the  parks  are  its  eyes,  surely  Trafalgar  Square 
may  well  be  reckoned  its  heart.  There  is  no 
hour  of  day  or  night  when  it  is  not  admirable, 
but  for  my  part  I  prefer  the  evening,  just  as  it 
grows  dusk,  after  a  day  of  heavy  rain.  How 
often  have  I  walked  up  and  down,  for  mere 
pleasure,  for  a  pleasure  which  quickened  into 
actual  excitement,  on  that  broad,  curved  plat- 
form from  which  you  can  turn  to  look  up  at 
the  National  Gallery,  like  a  frontispiece,  and 
from  which  you  can  look  down  over  the  dark 

6 


stone  pavement,  black  and  shining  with  rain, 
on  which  the  curved  fountains  stand  with  their 
inky  water,  while  two  gas-lamps  cast  a  feeble 
light  on  the  granite  base  of  the  Nelson  monu- 
ment and  on  the  vast  sulky  lions  at  the  corners. 
The  pedestal  goes  up  straight  into  the  sky, 
diminishing  the  roofs,  which  curve  downwards 
to  the  white  clock-face,  alone  visible  on  the 
clock-tower  at  Westminster.  Whitehall  flows 
like  a  river,  on  which  vague  shapes  of  traffic 
float  and  are  submerged.  The  mist  and  the 
twilight  hide  the  one  harmonious  building  in 
London,  the  Banqueting  Hall.  You  realize 
that  it  is  there,  and  that  beyond  it  are  the 
Abbey  and  the  river,  with  the  few  demure 
squares  and  narrow  frugal  streets  still  left 
standing  in  Westminster. 

It  is  only  after  trying  to  prefer  the  parks 
and  public  gardens  of  most  of  the  other  capi- 
tals of  Europe  that  I  have  come  to  convince 
myself  that  London  can  more  than  hold  its 
own  against  them  all.  We  have  no  site  com- 
parable with  the  site  of  the  Pincio  in  Rome, 
none  of  the  opalescent  w^ater  which  encircles 
the  gardens  at  Venice,  no  Sierras  to  see  from 
our  Prado,  not  even  a  Berlin  forest  in  the  midst 
of  the  city;  and  I  for  one  have  never  loved  a 
London  park  as  I  have  loved  the  Luxembourg 

7 


Gardens;  but,  if  we  will  be  frank  with  our- 
selves, and  put  sentiment  or  the  prejudice  of 
foreign  travel  out  of  our  heads,  we  shall  have 
to  admit  that  in  the  natural  properties  of  the 
park,  in  grass,  trees,  and  the  magic  of  atmo- 
sphere, London  is  not  to  be  excelled. 

And,  above  all,  in  freshness.  After  the  Lon- 
don parks  all  others  seem  dustyand  dingy.  It  is 
the  English  rain,  and  not  the  care  of  our  park- 
keepers,  that  brings  this  gloss  out  of  the  grass 
and  gives  our  public  gardens  theirair  of  country 
freedom.  Near  the  Round  Pond  you  might  be 
anywhere  except  in  the  middle  of  acity  of  smoke 
and  noise,  and  it  is  only  by  an  unusually  high 
roof  or  chimney,  somewhere  against  the  sky, 
far  off,  that  you  can  realize  where  you  are.  The 
Serpentine  will  never  be  vulgarized,  though 
cockneys  paddle  on  it  in  boats;  the  water  in 
St.  James's  Park  will  always  be  kept  wild  and 
strange  by  the  sea-gulls ;  and  the  toy-boats  only 
give  an  infantile  charm  to  the  steel-blue  water 
of  the  Round  Pond.  You  can  go  astray  in  long 
avenues  of  trees,  where,  in  autumn,  there  are 
always  children  playing  among  the  leaves, 
building  tombs  and  castles  with  them.  In 
summer  you  can  sit  for  a  whole  afternoon, 
undisturbed,  on  a  chair  on  that  green  slope 
which  goes  down  to  the  artificial  end  of  the 


Serpentine,  where  the  stone  parapets  are,  over 
the  water  from  the  peacocks.  It  is  only  the 
parks  that  make  summer  in  London  almost 
bearable. 

I  have  never  been  able  to  love  Regent's 
Park,  though  I  know  it  better  than  the  others, 
and  though  it  has  lovely  water-birds  about  its 
islands,  and  though  it  is  on  the  way  to  the 
Zoological  Gardens.  Its  flowers  are  the  best 
in  London,  for  colour,  form,  and  tending.  You 
hear  the  wild  beasts,  but  no  city  noises.  Those 
sounds  of  roaring,  crying,  and  the  voices  of  im- 
prisoned birds  are  sometimes  distressing,  and 
are  perhaps  one  of  the  reasons  why  one  can 
never  be  quite  happy  or  aloof  from  things  in 
Regent's  Park.  The  water  there  is  meagre, 
and  the  boats  too  closely  visible;  the  children 
are  poorer  and  seem  more  preoccupied  than  the 
children  in  the  western  parks.  And  there  is 
the  perplexing  inner  circle,  which  is  as  difficult 
to  get  in  or  out  of  as  its  lamentable  namesake 
underground.  Coming  where  it  does,  the  park 
is  a  breathing-place,  an  immense  relief;  but  it 
is  the  streets  around,  and  especially  the  Mary- 
lebone  Road,  that  give  it  its  value. 

There  remains  what  is  more  than  a  park, 
but  in  its  way  worth  them  all:  Hampstead 
Heath.   There  are  to  be  trains  to  bring  poor 

9  c 


people  from  the  other  end  of  London,  philan- 
thropic trains,  but  the  heath  will  be  spoilt, 
and  it  is  almost  the  last  thing  left  to  spoil  in 
London.  Up  to  now,  all  the  Saturday  after- 
noons, the  Sundays,  the  Bank  Holidays,  have 
hardly  touched  it.  There  are  hiding-places, 
even  on  these  evil  days,  and  if  one  fails  there 
is  always  another.  And  if  one  has  the  good 
fortune  to  live  near  it,  and  can  come  out  in  the 
middle  of  the  night  upon  Judges'  Walk,  when 
the  moonlight  fills  the  hollow  like  a  deep  bowl, 
and  silence  is  like  that  peace  which  passeth 
understanding,  everything  else  in  London  will 
seem  trivial,  a  mere  individual  thing,  compared 
with  it. 

On  the  heath  you  are  lifted  over  London, 
but  you  are  in  London.  It  is  that  double  sense, 
that  nearness  and  remoteness  combined,  the 
sight  of  St.  Paul's  from  above  the  level  of  the 
dome,  the  houses  about  the  pond  in  the  Vale 
of  Health,  from  which  one  gets  so  unparalleled 
a  sensation.  But  the  heath  is  to  be  loved  for 
its  own  sake,  for  its  peace,  amplitude,  high 
bright  air  and  refreshment;  for  its  mystery, 
wildness,  formality;  for  its  grassy  pools  and 
hillocks  that  flow  and  return  like  waves  of  the 
sea;  for  its  green  grass  and  the  white  roads 
chequering  it;  for  its  bracken,  its  mist  and 

10 


bloom  of  trees.  Every  knoll  and  curve  of  it 
draws  the  feet  to  feel  their  soft  shapes;  one 
cannot  walk,  but  must  run  and  leap  on  Hamp- 
stead  Heath. 


II 


II 

AS  you  come  back  into  London  from  the 
xjl  country,  out  of  air  into  smoke,  rattling 
level  with  the  chimney-pots,  and  looking  down 
into  narrow  gulfs  swarming  with  men  and 
machines,  you  are  as  if  seized  in  a  gigantic 
grip.  First  comes  a  splendid  but  dishearten- 
ing sense  of  force,  forcing  you  to  admire  it, 
then  a  desperate  sense  of  helplessness.  Lon- 
don seems  a  vast  ant-heap,  and  you  are  one 
more  ant  dropped  on  the  heap.  You  are 
stunned,  and  then  you  come  to  yourself,  and 
your  thought  revolts  against  the  material 
weight  which  is  crushing  you.  What  a  huge 
futility  it  all  seems,  this  human  ant-heap, 
this  crawling  and  hurrying  and  sweating  and 
building  and  bearing  burdens,  and  never  rest- 
ing all  day  long  and  never  bringing  any  labour 
to  an  end.  After  the  fields  and  the  sky  Lon- 
don seems  trivial,  a  thing  artificially  made,  in 
which  people  work  at  senseless  toils,  for  idle 
and  imaginary  ends.  Labour  in  the  fields  is 
regular,  sane,  inevitable  as  the  labour  of  the 

12 


earth  with  its  roots.  You  are  in  your  place  in 
the  world,  between  the  grass  and  the  clouds, 
really  alive  and  living  as  natural  a  life  as  the 
beasts.  In  London  men  work  as  if  in  dark- 
ness, scarcely  seeing  their  own  hands  as  they 
work,  and  not  knowing  the  meaning  of  their 
labour.  They  wither  and  dwindle,  forgetting 
or  not  knowing  that  it  was  ever  a  pleasant 
thing  merely  to  be  alive  and  in  the  air.  They 
are  all  doing  things  for  other  people,  making 
useless  "improvements,"  always  perfecting 
the  achievement  of  material  results  with  newly 
made  tools.  They  are  making  things  cheaper, 
more  immediate  in  effect,  of  the  latest  modern 
make.  It  is  all  a  hurry,  a  levelling  downward, 
an  automobilization  of  the  mind. 

And  their  pleasures  are  as  their  labours. 
In  the  country  you  have  but  to  walk  or  look 
out  of  your  window  and  you  are  in  the  midst 
of  beautiful  and  living  things :  a  tree,  a  dimly 
jewelled  frog,  a  bird  in  flight.  Every  natural 
pleasure  is  about  you :  you  may  walk,  or  ride, 
or  skate,  or  swim,  or  merely  sit  still  and  be 
at  rest.  But  in  London  you  must  invent  plea- 
sures and  then  toil  after  them.  The  pleasures 
of  London  are  more  exhausting  than  its  toils. 
No  stone-breaker  on  the  roads  works  so  hard 
or  martyrs  his  flesh  so  cruelly  as  the  actress 

13 


or  the  woman  of  fashion.  No  one  in  London 
does  what  he  wants  to  do,  or  goes  where  he 
wants  to  go.  It  is  a  suffering  to  go  to  any 
theatre,  any  concert.  There  are  even  people 
who  go  to  lectures.  And  all  this  continual 
self-sacrifice  is  done  for  "amusement."  It  is 
astonishing. 

London  was  once  habitable,  in  spite  of  it- 
self. The  machines  have  killed  it.  The  old, 
habitable  London  exists  no  longer.  Charles 
Lamb  could  not  live  in  this  mechanical  city, 
out  of  which  everything  old  and  human  has 
been  driven  by  wheels  and  hammers  and  the 
fluids  of  noise  and  speed.  When  will  his 
affectionate  phrase,  "the  sweet  security  of 
streets,"  ever  be  used  again  of  London?  No 
one  will  take  a  walk  down  Fleet  Street  any 
more,  no  one  will  shed  tears  of  joy  in  the 
"motley  Strand,"  no  one  will  be  leisurable 
any  more,  or  turn  over  old  books  at  a  stall,  or 
talk  with  friends  at  the  street  corner.  Noise 
and  evil  smells  have  filled  the  streets  like 
tunnels  in  daylight;  it  is  a  pain  to  walk  in 
the  midst  of  all  these  hurrying  and  clattering 
machines;  the  multitude  of  humanity,  that 
"bath"  into  which  Baudelaire  loved  to  plunge, 
is  scarcely  discernible,  it  is  secondary  to  the 
machines;    it  is  only  in  a  machine  that  you 

14 


can  escape  the  machines.  London  that  was 
vast  and  smoky  and  loud,  now  stinks  and 
reverberates;  to  live  in  it  is  to  live  in  the 
hollow  of  a  clanging  bell,  to  breathe  its  air  is 
to  breathe  the  foulness  of  modern  progress. 

London  as  it  is  now  is  the  wreck  and  moral 
of  civilization.  We  are  more  civilized  every 
day,  every  day  we  can  go  more  quickly  and 
more  uncomfortably  wherever  we  want  to  go, 
we  can  have  whatever  we  want  brought  to  us 
more  quickly  and  more  expensively.  We  live 
by  touching  buttons  and  ringing  bells,  a  new 
purely  practical  magic  sets  us  in  communica- 
tion with  the  ends  of  the  earth.  We  can  have 
abominable  mockeries  of  the  arts  of  music  and 
of  speech  whizzing  in  our  ears  out  of  metal 
mouths.  We  have  outdone  the  wildest  pro- 
phetic buffooneries  of  Villiers  de  I'lsle  Adam, 
whose  "celestial  bill-sticking"  may  be  seen 
nightly  defacing  the  majesty  of  the  river;  here 
any  gramophones  can  give  us  the  equivalent 
of  his  "chemical  analysis  of  the  last  breath." 
The  plausible  and  insidious  telephone  aids  us 
and  intrudes  upon  us,  taking  away  our  liberty 
from  us,  and  leaving  every  Englishman's  house 
his  castle  no  longer,  but  a  kind  of  whispering 
gallery,  open  to  the  hum  of  every  voice.  There 
is  hardly  a  street  left  in  London  where  one  can 

15 


talk  with  open  windows  by  day  and  sleep  with 
open  windows  by  night.  We  are  tunnelled 
under  until  our  houses  rock,  we  are  shot 
through  holes  in  the  earth  if  we  want  to  cross 
London;  even  the  last  liberty  of  Hampstead 
Heath  is  about  to  be  taken  from  us  by  railway. 
London  has  civilized  itself  into  the  likeness  of 
a  steam  roundabout  at  a  fair;  it  goes  clatter- 
ing and  turning,  to  the  sound  of  a  jubilant 
hurdy-gurdy;  round  and  round,  always  on  the 
same  track,  but  always  faster ;  and  the  children 
astride  its  wooden  horses  think  they  are  get- 
ting to  the  world's  end. 

It  is  the  machines,  more  than  anything  else, 
that  have  done  it.  Men  and  women,  as  they 
passed  each  other  in  the  street  or  on  the  road, 
saw  and  took  cognizance  of  each  other,  human 
being  of  human  being.  The  creatures  that  we 
see  now  in  the  machines  are  hardly  to  be  called 
human  beings,  so  are  they  disfigured  out  of 
all  recognition,  in  order  that  they  may  go  fast 
enough  not  to  see  anything  themselves.  Does 
anyone  any  longer  walk?  If  I  walk  I  meet  no 
one  walking,  and  I  cannot  wonder  at  it,  for 
what  I  meet  is  an  uproar,  and  a  whizz,  and  a 
leap  past  me,  and  a  blinding  cloud  of  dust, 
and  a  machine  on  which  scarecrows  perch  is 
disappearing  at  the  end  of  the  road.  The  verbs 

i6 


to  loll,  to  lounge,  to  dawdle,  to  loiter,  the  verbs 
precious  to  Walt  Whitman,  precious  to  every 
lover  of  men  and  of  himself,  are  losing  their 
currency;  they  will  be  marked  "o"  for  obso- 
lete in  the  dictionaries  of  the  future.  All  that 
poetry  which  Walt  Whitman  found  in  things 
merely  because  they  were  alive  will  fade  out 
of  existence  like  the  Red  Indian.  It  will  live 
on  for  some  time  yet  in  the  country  where  the 
railway  has  not  yet  smeared  its  poisonous  trail 
over  the  soil;  but  in  London  there  will  soon 
be  no  need  of  men,  there  will  be  nothing  but 
machines. 

There  was  a  time  when  it  was  enough  merely 
to  be  alive,  and  to  be  in  London.  Every  morn- 
ing promised  an  adventure ;  something  or 
someone  might  be  waiting  at  the  corner  of  the 
next  street;  it  was  difficult  to  stay  indoors 
because  there  were  so  many  people  in  the 
streets.  I  still  think,  after  seeing  most  of  the 
capitals  of  Europe,  that  there  is  no  capital  in 
Europe  where  so  many  beautiful  women  are 
to  be  seen  as  in  London.  Warsaw  comes  near, 
for  rarity ;  not  for  number.  The  streets  and 
the  omnibuses  were  always  alive  with  beauty 
or  with  something  strange.  In  London  any- 
thing may  happen.  "Adventures  to  the  ad- 
venturous!"   says    somebody   in    "Contarini 

17  D 


Fleming."  But  who  can  look  as  high  as  the 
uneasy  faces  on  a  motor-omnibus,  who  can 
look  under  the  hoods  and  goggles  in  a  motor- 
car? The  roads  are  too  noisy  now  for  any 
charm  of  expression  to  be  seen  on  the  pave- 
ments. The  women  are  shouting  to  each  other, 
straining  their  ears  to  hear.  They  want  to  get 
their  shopping  done  and  to  get  into  a  motor- 
car or  a  motor-omnibus. 

Could  another  Charles  Lamb  create  a  new 
London? 


Ill 

How  much  of  Lamb's  London  is  left? 
"  London  itself  a  pantomime  and  a 
masquerade"  is  left,  and  "a  mind  that  loves 
to  find  itself  at  home  in  crowds  "  is  never  with- 
out those  streets  and  pavements  to  turn  by  its 
alchemy  into  pure  gold.  "  Is  any  night-walk 
comparable,"  as  he  asks,  and  need  not  have 
waited  for  an  answer,  "  to  a  walk  from  St. 
Paul's  to  Charing  Cross,  for  lighting  and  pav- 
ing, crowds  going  and  coming  without  respite, 
the  rattle  of  coaches  and  the  cheerfulness  of 
shops?"  "St.  Paul's  Churchyard!"  he  cries, 
"the  Strand!  Exeter  Change!  Charing  Cross, 
with  the  man  upon  the  black  horse!  These  are 
thy  gods,  O  London !  "  One  has  to  turn  to  the 
notes  on  the  letters  to  find  out  that  Exeter 
Change  was  "a great  building,  with  bookstalls 
and  miscellaneous  stalls  on  the  ground  floor 
and  a  menagerie  above."  How  delicious  that 
sounds!  But  then  "it was  demolished  in  1829." 
Temple  Bar  has  gone,  and  the  griffin,  which 

19 


would  have  seemed  to  Lamb  as  permanent  as 
London  Stone.  Staple  Inn  would  have  been 
less  of  an  anomaly  to  him  in  "  noble  Holborn  " 
than  it  is  to  us,  as  it  stands,  with  an  aged 
helplessness,  not  far  off  from  the  useful  hor- 
rors of  Holborn  Viaduct,  a  "  modern  improve- 
ment "  which  has  swept  away  the  old  timbered 
houses  that  used  to  make  an  island  in  the 
middle  of  the  street.  Like  all  old  London, 
that  is  not  hidden  away  in  a  corner,  (as  St. 
John's  Gateway  is,  on  its  hill  at  the  back  of 
Smithfield,  and  St.  Bartholomew's  Church, 
which  hinders  nobody's  passing,  and  the 
Charterhouse,  which  has  so  far  held  its  own) 
they  have  had  to  make  way  for  the  traffic,  that 
traffic  which  is  steadily  pushing  down  the  good 
things  that  are  old  and  shouldering  up  the 
bad  new  things  that  will  be  temporary.  We 
have  still,  and  for  historic  and  royal  reasons 
will  always  have,  Westminster  Abbey:  the 
Beautiful  Temple,  as  Lamb  called  it,  when  he 
was  religiously  occupied  in  "  shaming  the  sel- 
lers out  of  the  Temple."  A  church  that  is  not 
in  the  way  of  a  new  street,  or  does  not  intrude 
over  the  edge  of  a  new  widening,  is,  for  the 
most  part,  safe.  But  we,  who  live  now,  have 
seen  Christ's  Hospital,  that  comely  home  and 
fosterer  of  genius,  pulled  down,  stone  by  stone, 

20 


its  beautiful  memory  obliterated,  because  boys, 
they  say,  want  country  air.  That  was  one  of 
the  breathing-places,  the  old  quiet  things,  that 
helped  to  make  the  city  habitable.  Newgate 
has  been  pulled  down,  and  with  Newgate  goes 
some  of  the  strength  and  permanence  of  Lon- 
don. There  was  a  horrible  beauty  in  those  im- 
pregnable grey  stone  walls,  by  the  side  of  the 
city  pavement.  The  traffic  has  fallen  upon 
them  like  a  sea,  and  they  have  melted  away 
before  it. 

Lamb  saw  London  changing,  and  to  the 
end  he  said  "  London  streets  and  faces  cheer 
me  inexpressibly,  though  of  the  latter  not  one 
known  one  were  remaining."  But  to  his  sister 
it  seemed  that  he  ''  found  it  melancholy,"  ''  the 
very  streets,"  he  says,  "altering  every  day." 
Covent  Garden,  where  he  lived,  has  lasted; 
the  house  he  lived  in  still  stands  looking  into 
Bow  Street.  And  the  Temple,  that  lucky  cor- 
ner of  the  City  which  is  outside  city  jurisdic- 
tion, has  been  little  spoiled  by  time,  or  the 
worse  improvements  of  restorers.  But  I  ask 
myself  what  Lamb  would  have  said  if  he  had 
lived  to  see  tram-lines  sliming  the  bank  of  the 
river,  and  the  trees  amputated  to  preserve  the 
hats  of  living  creatures,  in  what  way  better  or 
more  worthy  of  attention  than  those  trees? 

21 


When  I  see  London  best  is  when  I  have 
been  abroad  for  a  long  time.  Then,  as  I  sit 
on  the  top  of  an  omnibus,  coming  in  from  the 
Marble  Arch,  that  long  line  of  Oxford  Street 
seems  a  surprising  and  delightful  thing,  full 
of  picturesque  irregularities,  and  Piccadilly 
Circus  seems  incredibly  alive  and  central,  and 
the  Strand  is  glutted  with  a  traffic  typically 
English.  I  am  able  to  remember  how  I  used 
to  turn  out  of  the  Temple  and  walk  slowly 
towards  Charing  Cross,  elbowing  my  way 
meditatively,  making  up  sonnets  in  my  head 
while  I  missed  no  attractive  face  on  the  pave- 
ment or  on  the  top  of  an  omnibus,  pleasantly 
conscious  of  the  shops  yet  undistracted  by 
them,  happy  because  I  was  in  the  midst  of 
people,  and  happier  still  because  they  were  all 
unknown  to  me.  For  years  that  was  my  feel- 
ing about  London,  and  noAv  I  am  always  grate- 
ful to  a  foreign  absence  which  can  put  me  back, 
if  only  for  a  day,  into  that  comfortable  frame 
of  mind.  Baudelaire's  phrase,  "  a  bath  of  mul- 
titude," seemed  to  have  been  made  for  me,  and 
I  suppose  for  five  years  or  so,  all  the  first  part 
of  the  time  when  I  was  living  in  the  Temple, 
I  never  stayed  indoors  for  the  whole  of  a  single 
evening.  There  were  times  when  I  went  out 
as  regularly  as  clockwork  every  night  on  the 

23 


stroke  of  eleven.  No  sensation  in  London  is 
so  familiar  to  me  as  that  emptiness  of  the 
Strand  just  before  the  people  come  out  of  the 
theatres,  but  an  emptiness  not  final  and  abso- 
lute like  that  at  ten  o'clock;  an  emptiness, 
rather,  in  which  there  are  the  first  stirrings  of 
movement.  The  cabs  shift  slightly  on  the 
ranks ;  the  cab-men  take  the  nose-bags  off  the 
horses'  heads,  and  climb  up  on  their  perches. 
There  is  an  expectancy  all  along  the  road: 
Italian  waiters  with  tight  greasy  hair  and 
white  aprons  stand  less  listlessly  at  the  tavern 
doors;  they  half  turn,  ready  to  back  into  the 
doorway  before  a  customer. 

As  you  walk  along,  the  stir  increases,  cabs 
crawl  out  of  side  streets  and  file  slowly  towards 
the  theatres;  the  footmen  cluster  about  the 
theatre-doors ;  here  and  there  someone  comes 
out  hurriedly  and  walks  down  the  street.  And 
then,  all  of  a  sudden,  as  if  at  some  unheard 
signal,  the  wide  doorways  are  blocked  with 
slowly  struggling  crowds,  you  see  tall  black 
hats  of  men  and  the  many  coloured  hair  of 
women,  jammed  together,  and  slightly  sway- 
ing to  and  fro,  as  if  rocked  from  under.  Black 
figures  break  through  the  crowd,  and  detach 
themselves  against  the  wheels  of  the  hansoms, 
a  flying  and  disclosing  cloak  swishes  against 

23 


the  shafts  and  is  engulfed  in  the  dark  hollow; 
horses  start,  stagger,  hammer  feverishly  with 
their  hoofs  and  are  off;  the  whole  roadway  is 
black  with  cabs  and  carriages,  and  the  omni- 
buses seem  suddenly  diminished.  The  pave- 
ment is  blocked,  the  crowd  of  the  doorway 
now  sways  only  less  helplessly  upon  the  pave- 
ment; you  see  the  women's  distracted  and 
irritated  eyes,  their  hands  clutching  at  cloaks 
that  will  not  come  together,  the  absurd  and 
anomalous  glitter  of  diamonds  and  bare  necks 
in  the  streets. 

Westward  the  crowd  is  more  scattered,  has 
more  space  to  disperse.  The  Circus  is  like  a 
whirlpool,  streams  pour  steadily  outward  from 
the  centre,  where  the  fountain  stands  for  a 
symbol.  The  lights  glitter  outside  theatres 
and  music-halls  and  restaurants;  lights  corus- 
cate, flash  from  the  walls,  dart  from  the  vehicles; 
a  dark  tangle  of  roofs  and  horses  knots  itself 
togetherand  swiftly  separates  at  everymoment; 
all  the  pavements  are  aswarm  with  people 
hurrying. 

In  half  an  hour  all  this  outflow  will  have 
subsided,  and  then  one  distinguishes  the  slow 
and  melancholy  walk  of  women  and  men,  as 
if  on  some  kind  of  penitential  duty,  round  and 

round  the  Circus  and  along  Piccadilly  as  far 

24 


as  the  Duke  of  Wellington's  house  and  along 
Regent  Street  almost  to  the  Circus.  Few  walk 
on  the  left  side  of  Piccadilly  or  the  right  of 
Regent  Street,  though  you  hear  foreign  tongues 
a-chatter  under  the  arcade.  But  the  steady 
procession  coils  backward  and  forward,  thick- 
ening and  slackening  as  it  rounds  the  Circus, 
where  innocent  people  wait  uncomfortably  for 
omnibuses,  standing  close  to  the  edge  of  the 
pavement.  Men  stand  watchfully  at  all  the 
corners,  with  their  backs  to  the  road ;  you  hear 
piping  voices,  shrill  laughter;  you  observe 
that  all  the  women's  eyes  are  turned  sideways, 
never  straight  in  front  of  them;  and  that  they 
seem  often  to  hesitate,  as  if  they  were  not  sure 
of  the  way,  though  they  have  walked  in  that 
procession  night  after  night,  and  know  every 
stone  of  the  pavement  and  every  moulding  on 
the  brass  rims  of  the  shop-windows.  The  same 
faces  return,  lessen,  the  people  come  out  of  the 
restaurants  and  the  crowd  thickens  for  ten 
minutes,  then  again  lessens;  and  fewer  and 
fewer  trudge  drearilyalong  the  almost  deserted 
pavement.  The  staring  lights  are  blotted  sud- 
denly from  the  walls;  the  streets  seem  to  grow 
chill,  uninhabited,  unfriendly;  the  few  han- 
soms roam  up  and  down  restlessly,  seeking  a 
last  fare.    And  still  a  few  dingy  figures  creep 

2$  E 


along  by  the  inner  edge  of  the  pavement,  stop- 
ping by  the  closed  doors  of  the  shops,  some- 
times speaking  dully  to  one  another;  then 
trudging  heavily  along,  and  disappearing 
slowly  through  the  side  streets  eastward. 

The  part  of  London  I  have  always  known 
best  is  the  part  that  lies  between  the  Temple 
and  Piccadilly,  and  some  of  it  no  longer  exists. 
When  the  Strand  was  widened,  Holywell 
Street,  one  of  the  oldest  and  quaintest  streets 
in  London,  was  pulled  down,  Wych  Street 
went  too,  and  Clare  Market,  and  many  dingy 
and  twisting  lanes  which  could  well  be  spared. 
But  I  deeply  regret  Holywell  Street,  and  when 
I  tell  strangers  about  it,  it  seems  to  me  that 
they  can  never  know  London  now.  I  suppose 
many  people  will  soon  forget  that  narrow  lane 
with  its  overhanging  wooden  fronts,  like  the 
houses  at  Coventry;  or  they  will  remember  it 
only  for  its  surreptitious  shop-windows,  the 
glass  always  dusty,  through  which  one  dimly 
saw  English  translations  of  Zola  among 
chemists'  paraphernalia.  The  street  had  a  bad 
reputation,  and  by  night  doors  opened  and 
shut  unexpectedly  up  dark  passages.  Perhaps 
that  vague  dubiousness  added  a  little  to  its 
charm,  but  by  day  the  charm  was  a  positive 

one:    the  book-shops!    Perhaps   I   liked  the 

26 


quays  at  Paris  even  better:  it  was  Paris,  and 
there  was  the  river,  and  Notre  Dame,  and  it 
was  the  left  bank.  But  nowhere  else,  in  no 
other  city,  was  there  a  corner  so  made  for 
book-fanciers.  Those  dingy  shops  with  their 
stalls  open  to  the  street,  nearly  all  on  the  right, 
the  respectable  side  as  you  walked  west,  how 
seldom  did  I  keep  my  resolution  to  walk  past 
them  with  unaverted  eyes,  how  rarely  did  I 
resist  their  temptations.  Half  the  books  I 
possess  were  bought  secondhand  in  Holywell 
Street,  and  what  bargains  I  have  made  out  of 
the  fourpenny  books!  On  the  hottest  days, 
there  was  shade  there,  and  excuse  for  lounging. 
It  was  a  paradise  for  the  book-lover. 

It  never  occurred  to  me  that  any  street  so 
old  could  seem  worth  pulling  down;  but  the 
improvements  came,  and  that  and  the  less  in- 
teresting streets  near,  where  the  Globe  Theatre 
was  (I  thought  it  no  loss)  had  of  course  to 
go;  and  Dane's  Inn  went,  which  was  never  a 
genuine  "  inn,"  but  had  some  of  the  pleasant 
genuine  dreariness;  and  Clare  Market  was 
obliterated,  and  I  believe  Drury  Lane  is  get- 
ting furbished  up  and  losing  its  old  savour  of 
squalor;  and  Aldwych  is  there,  with  its  beauti- 
ful name,  but  itself  so  big  and  obvious  that 
I    confess,    with    my   recollections   of   what 

27 


was  there  before,  I  can  never  find  my  way 
in  it. 

Striking  westward,  my  course  generally  led 
me  through  Leicester  Square.  The  foreign 
quarter  of  London  radiates  from  Leicester 
Square,  or  winds  inward  to  that  point  as  to 
a  centre.  Its  foreign  aspect,  the  fact  that  it 
was  the  park  of  Soho,  interested  me.  In 
Leicester  Square,  and  in  all  the  tiny  streets 
running  into  it,  you  are  never  in  the  really 
normal  London:  it  is  an  escape,  a  sort  of 
shamefaced  and  sordid  and  yet  irresistible  re- 
minder of  Paris  and  Italy.  The  little  restaur- 
ants all  round  brought  me  local  colour  before 
I  had  seen  Italy ;  I  still  see  with  pleasure  the 
straw  covered  bottles  and  the  strings  of  mac- 
caroni  in  the  undusted  windows.  The  foreign 
people  you  see  are  not  desirable  people:  what 
does  that  matter  if  you  look  on  them  as  on  so 
many  puppets  on  a  string,  and  their  shapes 
and  colours  come  as  a  relief  to  you  after  the 
uniform  puppets  of  English  make? 

I  have  always  been  apt  to  look  on  the  world 
as  a  puppet-show,  and  all  the  men  and  women 
merely  players,  whose  wires  we  do  not  see 
working.  There  is  a  passage  in  one  of  Keats' 
letters  which  expresses  just  what  I  have  always 
felt:  "  May  there  not,"  he  says,  "  be  superior 

28 


beings,  amused  with  any  graceful,  though  in- 
stinctive attitude  my  mind  may  fall  into,  as  I 
am  entertained  with  the  alertness  of  the  stoat 
or  the  anxiety  of  a  deer?  "  Is  there  not,  in  our 
aspect  towards  one  another,  something  inevit- 
ably automatic?  Do  we  see,  in  the  larger  part 
of  those  fellow-creatures  whom  our  eyes  rest 
on  more  than  a  smile,  a  gesture,  a  passing  or 
a  coming  forward?  Are  they  more  real  to  us 
than  the  actors  on  a  stage,  the  quivering  phan- 
toms of  a  cinematograph?  With  their  own 
private  existence  we  have  nothing  to  do:  do 
they  not,  so  far  as  we  are  concerned,  exist  in 
part  at  least  to  be  a  spectacle  to  us,  to  convey 
to  us  a  sense  of  life,  change,  beauty,  variety, 
necessity?  The  spectacle  of  human  life  is  not 
only  for  the  gods'  eyes,  but  for  ours;  it  is  ours 
in  so  far  as  we  can  apprehend  it,  and  our  plea- 
sure and  satisfaction  here  are  largely  depend- 
ent on  the  skill  with  which  we  have  trained 
ourselves  to  that  instinctive,  delighted  appre- 
hension. To  a  few  here  and  there  we  can  come 
closer,  we  can  make  them,  by  some  illusion  of 
the  affections,  seem  more  real  to  us.  But  as 
for  all  the  rest,  let  us  be  content  to  admire,  to 
wonder,  to  see  the  use  and  beauty  and  curi- 
osity of  them,  and  intrude  no  further  into  their 

destinies, 

29 


It  was  for  their  very  obvious  qualities  of 
illusion  that  I  liked  to  watch  the  people  in 
the  foreign  quarter.  They  were  like  prisoners 
there,  thriving  perhaps  but  discontented;  none 
of  them  light-hearted,  as  they  would  have  been 
in  their  own  country;  grudgingly  at  home. 
And  there  was  much  piteous  false  show  among 
them,  soiled  sordid  ostentation,  a  little  of  what 
we  see  in  the  older  songs  of  Yvette  Guilbert. 

London  was  for  a  long  time  my  supreme  sen- 
sation, and  to  roam  in  the  streets,  especially 
after  the  lamps  were  lighted,  my  chief  pleasure. 
I  had  no  motive  in  it,  merely  the  desire  to  get 
out  of  doors,  and  to  be  among  people,  lights, 
to  get  out  of  myself.  Myself  has  always  been 
so  absorbing  to  me  that  it  was  perhaps  natural 
that,  along  with  that  habitual  companionship, 
there  should  be  at  times  the  desire  for  escape. 
When  I  was  living  alone  in  the  Temple,  that 
desire  came  over  me  almost  every  night,  and 
made  work,  or  thought  without  work,  impos- 
sible. Later  in  the  night  I  was  often  able  to 
work  with  perfect  quiet,  but  not  unless  I  had 
been  out  in  the  streets  first.  The  plunge 
through  the  Middle  Temple  gateway  was  like 
the  swimmer's  plunge  into  rough  water:  I  got 
just  that  *'  cool  shock  "  as  I  went  outside  into 
the  brighter  lights  and  the  movement.    I  often 

30 


had  no  idea  where  I  was  going,  I  often  went 
nowhere.  I  walked,  and  there  were  people 
about  me. 

I  lived  in  Fountain  Court  for  ten  years,  and 
I  thought  then,  and  think  still,  that  it  is  the 
most  beautiful  place  in  London.  Dutch  people 
have  told  me  that  the  Temple  is  like  a  little 
Dutch  town,  and  that  as  they  enter  from  Fleet 
Street  into  Middle  Temple  Lane  they  can  fancy 
themselves  at  the  Hague.  Dutchmen  are  happy 
if  they  have  much  that  can  remind  them  of 
Middle  Temple  Lane.  There  is  a  moment 
when  you  are  in  Fleet  Street ;  you  have  forced 
your  way  through  the  long  Strand,  along  those 
narrow  pavements,  in  a  continual  coming  and 
going  of  hurried  people,  with  the  continual 
rumble  of  wheels  in  the  road,  the  swaying 
heights  of  omnibuses  beside  you,  distracting 
your  eyes,  the  dust,  clatter,  confusion,  heat,  be- 
wilderment of  that  thoroughfare;  and  suddenly 
you  go  under  a  low  doorway,  where  large 
wooden  doors  and  a  smaller  side-door  stand 
open,  and  you  are  suddenly  in  quiet.  The  roar 
has  dropped,  as  the  roar  of  the  sea  drops  if 
you  go  in  at  your  door  and  shut  it  behind 
you.  At  night,  when  one  had  to  knock,  and 
so  waited,  and  was  admitted  with  a  nice  for- 
mality, it  was  sometimes  almost  startling.    I 

31 


have  never  felt  any  quiet  in  solitary  places  so 
much  as  the  quiet  of  that  contrast :  Fleet  Street 
and  the  Temple. 

No  wheels  could  come  nearer  to  me  in 
Fountain  Court  than  Middle  Temple  Lane, 
but  I  liked  to  hear  sometimes  at  night  a  faint 
clattering,  only  just  audible,  which  I  knew  was 
the  sound  of  a  cab  on  the  Embankment.  The 
County  Council,  steadily  ruining  London  with 
the  persistence  of  an  organic  disease,  is  busy 
turning  the  Embankment  into  a  gangway  for 
electric  trams;  but  when  I  knew  it  it  was  a 
quiet,  almost  secluded  place,  where  people 
sauntered  and  leaned  over  to  look  into  the 
water,  and  where,  at  night,  the  policemen 
would  walk  with  considerately  averted  head 
past  the  slumbering  heaps  of  tired  rags  on  the 
seats. 

The  gates  on  the  Embankment  shut  early 
but  I  often  came  home  by  the  river  and  I  could 
hardly  tear  myself  away  from  looking  over  that 
grey  harsh  parapet.  The  Neva  reminds  me  a 
little  of  the  Thames,  though  it  rushes  more 
wildly,  and  at  night  is  more  like  a  sea,  with 
swift  lights  crossing  it.  But  I  do  not  know 
the  river  of  any  great  capital  which  has  the 
fascination  of  our  river.  Whistler  has  created 
the  Thames,  for  most  people;  but  the  Thames 

32 


existed  before  Whistler,  and  will  exist  after  the 
County  Council.  I  remember  hearing  Claude 
Monet  say,  at  the  time  when  he  came  over  to 
the  Savoy  Hotel,  year  by  year,  to  paint  Water- 
loo Bridge  from  its  windows,  that  he  could  not 
understand  why  any  English  painter  ever  left 
London.  I  felt  almost  as  if  the  river  belonged 
to  the  Temple:  its  presence  there,  certainly, 
was  part  of  its  mysterious  anomaly,  a  fragment 
of  old  London,  walled  and  guarded  in  that 
corner  of  land  between  Fleet  Street  and  the 
Thames. 

It  was  the  name,  partly,  that  had  drawn  me 
to  Fountain  Court,  and  the  odd  coincidence 
that  I  had  found  myself,  not  long  before,  in 
what  was  once  Blake's  Fountain  Court,  and 
then  Southampton  Buildings,  now  only  a  date 
on  a  wall.  I  had  the  top  flat  in  what  is  really 
the  back  of  one  of  the  old  houses  in  Essex 
Street,  taken  into  the  Temple;  it  had  a  stone 
balcony  from  which  I  looked  down  on  a  wide 
open  court,  with  a  stone  fountain  in  the  middle, 
broad  rows  of  stone  steps  leading  upward  and 
downward,  with  a  splendid  effect  of  decoration ; 
in  one  corner  of  the  court  was  Middle  Temple 
Hall,  where  a  play  of  Shakespeare's  was  acted 
while  Shakespeare  was  alive;  all  around  were 
the  backs  of  old  buildings,  and  there  were  old 

33  f" 


trees,  under  which  there  was  a  bench  in  sum- 
mer, and  there  was  the  glimpse  of  gardens  go- 
ing down  to  the  Embankment.  By  day  it  was 
as  legal  and  busy  as  any  other  part  of  the 
Temple,  but  the  mental  business  of  the  law  is 
not  inelegantly  expressed  in  those  wigged  and 
gowned  figures  who  are  generally  to  be  seen 
crossing  between  the  Law  Courts  and  their 
chambers  in  the  Temple.  I  felt,  when  I  saw 
them,  that  I  was  the  intruder,  the  modern  note, 
and  that  they  were  in  their  place,  and  keeping 
up  a  tradition.  But  at  night  I  had  the  place 
to  myself. 

The  nights  in  Fountain  Court  were  a  con- 
tinual delight  to  me.  I  lived  then  chiefly  by 
night,  and  when  I  came  in  late  I  used  often  to 
sit  on  the  bench  under  the  trees,  where  no  one 
else  ever  sat  at  those  hours.  I  sat  there,  look- 
ing at  the  silent  water  in  the  basin  of  the  foun- 
tain, and  at  the  leaves  overhead,  and  at  the  sky 
through  the  leaves;  and  that  solitude  was  only 
broken  by  the  careful  policeman  on  guard,  who 
would  generally  stroll  up  to  be  quite  certain 
that  it  was  the  usual  loiterer,  who  had  a  right 
to  sit  there.  Sometimes  he  talked  with  me, 
and  occasionally  about  books;  and  once  he 
made  a  surprising  and  profound  criticism,  for 
on  my  asking  him  if  he  had  read  Tennyson 

34 


he  said  no,  but  was  he  not  rather  a  lady-like 
writer? 

When  Verlaine  stayed  with  me  he  wrote 
a  poem  about  Fountain  Court,  which  began 
truthfully: 

La  Cour  de  la  Fontaine  est,  dans  le  Temple, 
Un  coin  exquis  de  ce  coin  delicat 
Du  Londres  vieux. 

Dickens  of  course  has  written  about  the  foun- 
tain, but  there  is  only  one  man  who  could  ever 
have  given  its  due  to  that  corner  of  the  Temple, 
and  he  had  other,  less  lovely  corners  to  love. 
I  say  over  everything  Charles  Lamb  wrote 
about  the  Temple,  and  fancy  it  was  meant  for 
Fountain  Court. 

More  than  once,  while  I  was  living  in  the 
Temple,  I  was  visited  by  a  strange  friend  of 
mine,  an  amateur  tramp,  with  whom  I  used 
to  wander  about  London  every  night  in  the 
East  End,  and  about  the  Docks,  and  in  all  the 
more  squalid  parts  of  the  city.  My  friend  was 
born  a  wanderer,  and  I  do  not  know  what 
remains  for  him  in  the  world  when  he  has 
tramped  over  its  whole  surface.  I  have  known 
him  for  many  years,  and  we  have  explored 
many  cities  together,  and  crossed  more  than 
one  sea,  and  travelled  along  the  highroads  of 

35 


more  than  one  country.  His  tramping  with 
me  was  not  very  serious,  but  when  he  is  alone 
he  goes  as  a  tramp  among  tramps,  taking  no 
money  with  him,  begging  his  way  with  beggars. 
A  little,  pale,  thin  young  man,  quietly  restless, 
with  determined  eyes  and  tight  lips,  a  face  pre- 
pared for  all  disguises,  yet  with  a  strangely 
personal  life  looking  out  at  you,  ambiguously 
enough,  from  underneath,  he  is  never  quite  at 
home  under  a  roof  or  in  the  company  of  ordin- 
ary people,  where  he  seems  always  like  one 
caught  and  detained  unwillingly.  An  Ameri- 
can, who  has  studied  in  a  German  University, 
brought  up,  during  all  his  early  life,  in  Berlin, 
he  has  always  had  a  fixed  distaste  for  the  in- 
terests of  those  about  him,  and  an  instinctive 
passion  for  whatever  exists  outside  the  border- 
line which  shuts  us  in  upon  respectability. 
There  is  a  good  deal  of  affectation  in  the  liter- 
ary revolt  against  respectability,  together  with 
a  child's  desire  to  shock  its  elders,  and  snatch 
a  lurid  reputation  from  those  whom  it  professes 
to  despise.  My  friend  has  never  had  any  of 
this  affectation;  life  is  not  a  masquerade  to 
him,  and  his  disguises  are  the  most  serious 
part  of  his  life.  The  simple  fact  is,  that  re- 
spectability, the  normal  existence  of  normal 
people,  does  not  interest  him;   he  could  not 

36 


eventell  you  why,  without  searchingconsciously 
for  reasons ;  he  was  born  with  the  soul  of  a 
vagabond,  into  a  family  of  gentle,  exquisitely 
refined  people:  he  was  born  so,  that  is  all. 
Human  curiosity,  curiosity  which  in  most  of 
us  is  subordinate  to  some  more  definite  pur- 
pose, exists  in  him  for  its  own  sake;  it  is  his 
inner  life,  he  has  no  other;  his  form  of  self- 
development,  his  form  of  culture.  It  seems  to 
me  that  this  man,  who  has  seen  so  much  of 
humanity,  who  has  seen  humanity  so  closely, 
where  it  has  least  temptation  to  be  anything 
but  itself,  has  really  achieved  culture  almost 
perfect  of  its  kind,  though  the  kind  be  of  his 
own  invention.  He  is  not  an  artist,  who  can 
create;  he  is  not  a  thinker  or  a  dreamer  or  a 
man  of  action;  he  is  a  student  of  men  and 
women,  and  of  the  outcasts  among  men  and 
women,  just  those  persons  who  are  least  ac- 
cessible, least  cared  for,  least  understood,  and 
therefore,  to  one  like  my  friend,  most  alluring. 
He  is  not  conscious  of  it,  but  I  think  there  is 
a  great  pity  at  the  heart  of  this  devouring 
curiosity.  It  is  his  love  of  the  outcast  which 
makes  him  like  to  live  with  outcasts,  not  as 
a  visitor  in  their  midst,  but  as  one  of  them- 
selves. 

For  here  is  the  difference  between  this  man 

37 


and  the  other  adventurers  who  have  gone 
abroad  among  tramps  and  criminals,  and  other 
misunderstood  or  unfortunate  people.  Some 
have  been  philanthropists  and  have  gone  with 
Bibles  in  their  hands;  others  have  been  journal- 
ists, and  have  gone  with  note-books  in  their 
hands;  all  have  gone  as  visitors,  as  passing 
visitors,  plunginginto  "the  bath  of  multitude," 
as  one  might  go  holiday-making  to  the  sea-side 
and  plunge  into  the  sea.  But  this  man,  wher- 
ever he  has  gone,  has  gone  with  a  complete 
abandonment  to  his  surroundings;  no  tramp 
has  ever  known  that  * '  Cigarette  "  was  not  really 
a  tramp;  he  has  begged,  worked,  ridden  out- 
side trains,  slept  in  workhouses  and  gaols,  not 
shirked  one  of  the  hardships  of  his  way;  and 
all  the  time  he  has  been  living  his  own  life 
(whatever  that  enigma  maybe!)  more  perfectly, 
I  am  sure,  than  when  he  is  dining  every  day  at 
his  mother's  or  his  sister's  table. 

The  desire  of  travelling  on  many  roads,  and 
the  desire  of  seeing  many  foreign  faces,  are 
almost  always  found  united  in  that  half- 
unconscious  instinct  which  makes  a  man  a 
vagabond.  But  I  have  never  met  anyone  in 
whom  the  actual  love  of  the  road  is  so  strong 
as  it  is  in  my  friend.  In  America,  where  the 
tramps  ride  over  and   under  the   trains,   in 

38 


order  that  they  may  get  on  the  other  side  of 
a  thousand  miles  without  spending  a  lifetime 
about  it,  he,  too,  has  gone  by  rail,  not  as  a 
passenger.  And  I  remember  a  few  years  ago, 
when  we  had  given  one  another  rendezvous 
at  St.  Petersburg,  that  I  found,  when  I  got 
there,  that  he  was  already  half-way  across 
Siberia,  on  the  new  railway  which  they  w^ere 
in  the  act  of  making.  Also  I  have  been  with 
him  to  Hamburg  and  Le  Havre  and  Antwerp 
by  sea:  once  on  an  Atlantic  liner,  loaded  with 
foreign  Jews,  among  whom  he  spent  most  of 
his  time  in  the  steerage.  But  for  the  most 
part  he  walks.  Wherever  he  walks  he  makes 
friends;  when  we  used  to  walk  about  London 
together  he  would  stop  to  talk  with  every 
drunken  old  woman  in  Drury  Lane,  and  get 
into  the  confidence  of  every  sailor  whom  we 
came  upon  in  the  pot-houses  about  the  docks. 
He  is  not  fastidious,  and  will  turn  his  hand, 
as  the  phrase  is,  to  anything.  And  he  goes 
through  every  sort  of  privation,  endures  dirt, 
accustoms  himself  to  the  society  of  every 
variety  of  his  fellow-creatures  without  a  mur- 
mur or  regret. 

After  all,  comfort  is  a  convention,  and  plea- 
sure an  individual  thing,  to  every  individual. 
"To  travel  is   to   die  continually,"  wrote  a 

39 


half-crazy  poet  who  spent  most  of  the  years 
of  a  short  fantastic  life  in  London.  Well,  that 
is  a  line  which  I  have  often  found  myself 
repeating  as  I  shivered  in  railway-stations 
on  the  other  side  of  Europe,  or  lay  in  a 
plunging  berth  as  the  foam  chased  the  snow- 
flakes  off  the  deck.  One  finds,  no  doubt,  a 
particular  pleasure  in  looking  back  on  past 
discomforts,  and  I  am  convinced  that  a  good 
deal  of  the  attraction  of  travelling  comes  from 
an  unconscious  throwing  forward  of  the  mind 
to  the  time  when  the  uncomfortable  present 
shall  have  become  a  stirring  memory  of  the 
past.  But  I  am  speaking  now  for  those  in 
whom  a  certain  luxuriousness  of  temperament 
finds  itself  in  sharp  conflict  with  the  desire  of 
movement.  To  my  friend,  I  think,  this  is 
hardly  a  conceivable  state  of  mind.  He  is  a 
Stoic,  as  the  true  adventurer  should  be.  Rest, 
even  as  a  change,  does  not  appeal  to  him.  He 
thinks  acutely,  but  only  about  facts,  about 
the  facts  before  him ;  and  so  he  does  not  need 
to  create  an  atmosphere  about  himself  which 
change  might  disturb.  He  is  fond  of  his 
family,  his  friends;  but  he  can  do  without 
them,  like  a  man  with  a  mission.  He  has  no 
mission,  only  a  great  thirst;  and  this  thirst 
for  the  humanity  of  every  nation  and  for  the 

40 


roads  of  every  country  drives  him  onward  as 
resistlessly  as  the  drunkard's  thirst  for  drink, 
or  the  idealist's  thirst  for  an  ideal. 

And  it  seems  to  me  that  few  men  have 
realized,  as  this  man  has  realized,  that  "not 
the  fruit  of  experience,  but  experience  itself, 
is  the  end."  He  has  chosen  his  life  for  him- 
self, and  he  has  lived  it,  regardless  of  any- 
thing else  in  the  world.  He  has  desired 
strange,  almost  inaccessible  things,  and  he 
has  attained  whatever  he  has  desired.  While 
other  men  have  lamented  their  fate,  wished 
their  lives  different,  nursed  vague  ambitions, 
and  dreamed  fruitless  dreams,  he  has  quietly 
given  up  comfort  and  conventionality,  not 
caring  for  them,  and  he  has  gone  his  own 
way  without  even  stopping  to  think  whether 
the  way  were  difficult  or  desirable.  Not  long 
since,  walking  with  a  friend  in  the  streets  of 
New  York,  he  said  suddenly:  "  Do  you  know, 
I  wonder  what  it  is  like  to  chase  a  man?  I 
know  what  it  is  like  to  be  chased,  but  to 
chase  a  man  would  be  a  new  sensation."  The 
other  man  laughed,  and  thought  no  more  about 
it.  A  week  later  my  friend  came  to  him  with 
an  official  document:  he  had  been  appointed 
a  private  detective.  He  was  set  on  the  track 
of  a  famous  criminal  (whom,  as  it  happened, 

41  G 


he  had  known  as  a  tramp);  he  made  his  plans, 
worked  them  out  successfully,  and  the  criminal 
was  caught.  To  have  done  it  was  enough:  he 
had  had  the  sensation;  he  has  done  no  more 
work  as  a  detective.  Is  there  not,  in  this 
curiosity  in  action,  this  game  mastered  and 
then  cast  aside,  a  wonderful  promptness,  sure- 
ness,  a  moral  quality  which  is  itself  success  in 
life? 

To  desire  so  much,  and  what  is  so  human, 
to  make  one's  life  out  of  the  very  fact  of  living 
it  as  one  chooses;  to  create  a  unique  personal 
satisfaction  out  of  discontent  and  curiosity; 
to  be  so  much  oneself  in  learning  so  much 
from  other  people:  is  not  this,  in  its  way,  an 
ideal,  and  has  not  my  friend  achieved  it?  What 
I  like  in  him  so  much  is  that  he  is  a  vagabond 
without  an  object.  He  has  written  one  book, 
but  writing  has  come  to  him  as  an  accident; 
and,  in  writing,  his  danger  is  to  be  too  literal 
for  art,  and  not  quite  literal  enough  for  science. 
He  is  too  completely  absorbed  in  people  and 
things  to  be  able  ever  to  get  aloof  from  them; 
and  to  write  well  of  what  one  has  done  and 
seen  one  must  be  able  to  get  aloof  from  one- 
self and  from  others.  If  ever  a  man  loved 
wandering  for  its  own   sake  it  was  George 

Borrow;    but  George   Borrow  had  a  serious 

42 


and  whimsical  brain  always  at  work,  twisting 
the  things  that  he  saw  into  shapes  that  pleased 
him  more  than  the  shapes  of  the  things  in 
themselves.  My  friend  is  interested  in  what 
he  calls  sociology,  but  the  interest  is  almost 
as  accidental  as  his  interest  in  literature  or  in 
philanthropy.  He  has  the  soul  and  feet  of 
the  vagabond,  the  passion  of  the  roads.  He 
is  restless  under  any  roof  but  the  roof  of 
stars.  He  cares  passionately  for  men  and 
women,  not  because  they  are  beautiful  or 
good  or  clever,  or  because  he  can  do  them 
good,  or  because  they  can  be  serviceable  to 
him,  but  because  they  are  men  and  women. 
And  he  cares  for  men  and  women  where  they 
are  most  vividly  themselves,  where  they  have 
least  need  for  disguise;  for  poor  people,  and 
people  on  the  roads,  idle  people,  criminals 
sometimes,  the  people  who  are  so  much  them- 
selves that  they  are  no  longer  a  part  of  society. 
He  wanders  over  the  whole  earth,  but  he  does 
not  care  for  the  beauty  or  strangeness  of  what 
he  sees,  only  for  the  people.  Writing  to  me 
lately  from  Samarcand,  he  said:  "  I  have  seen 
the  tomb  of  the  prophet  Daniel;  I  have  seen 
the  tomb  of  Tamerlane."  But  Tamerlane  was 
nothing  to  him,  the  prophet  Daniel  was  no- 
thing to  him.    He  mentioned  them  only  be- 

43 


cause  they  would  interest  me.  He  was  trying 
to  puzzle  out  and  piece  together  the  psychology 
of  the  Persian  beggar  whom  he  had  left  at  the 
corner  of  the  way. 


44 


IV 

WHEN  my  French  friends  come  to  Lon- 
don they  say  to  me:  where  is  your 
Montmartre,  where  is  your  Quartier  Latin? 
We  have  no  Montmartre  (not  even  Chelsea  is 
that),  no  Quartier  Latin,  because  there  is  no 
instinct  in  the  Englishman  to  be  companion- 
able in  public.  Occasions  are  lacking,  it  is 
true,  for  the  cafe  is  responsible  for  a  good  part 
of  the  artistic  Bohemianism  of  Paris,  and  we 
have  no  cafes.  I  prophesy  in  these  pages  that 
some  day  someone,  probably  an  American 
who  has  come  by  way  of  Paris,  will  set  back 
the  plate-glass  windows  in  many  angles,  which 
I  could  indicate  to  him,  of  the  Strand,  Picca- 
dilly, and  other  streets,  and  will  turn  the  whole 
wall  into  windows,  and  leave  a  space  in  front 
for  a  terrasse,  in  the  Paris  manner,  and  we 
shall  have  cafds  like  the  cafes  in  Paris,  and  the 
prestidigitateur  who  has  done  this  will  soon 
have  made  a  gigantic  fortune.  But  meanwhile 
let  us  recognise  that  there  is  in  London  no 
companionship  in  public  (in  the  open  air  or 

45 


visible  through  windows)  and  that  nothing  in 
Cafds  Royaux  and  Monicos  and  the  like  can 
have  the  sort  of  meaning  for  young  men  in 
London  that  the  cafds  have  long  had,  and  still 
have,  in  Paris.  Attempts  have  been  made,  and 
I  have  shared  in  them,  and  for  their  time  they 
had  their  entertainment;  but  I  have  not  seen 
one  that  flourished. 

I  remember  the  desperate  experiments  of 
some  to  whom  Paris,  from  a  fashion,  had  be- 
come almost  a  necessity;  and  how  Dowson 
took  to  cabmen's  shelters  as  a  sort  of  supper- 
club.  Different  taverns  were  at  different  times 
haunted  by  young  writers ;  some  of  them  came 
for  the  drink  and  some  for  the  society;  and 
one  bold  attempt  was  made  to  get  together  a 
cdnacle  in  quite  the  French  manner  in  the 
upper  room  of  a  famous  old  inn.  In  London 
we  cannot  read  our  poems  to  one  another,  as 
they  do  in  Paris;  we  cannot  even  talk  about 
our  own  works,  frankly,  with  a  natural  pride, 
a  good-humoured  equality.  They  can  do  that 
in  Dublin,  and  in  an  upper  room  in  Dublin  I 
find  it  quite  natural.  But  in  London  even 
those  of  us  who  are  least  Anglo-Saxon  cannot 
do  it.  Is  it  more,  I  wonder,  a  loss  to  us  or  a 
gain? 

This  lack  of  easy  meeting  and   talking  is 

46 


certainly  one  of  the  reasons  why  there  have 
been  in  England  many  great  writers  but  few 
schools.  In  Paris  a  young  man  of  twenty  starts 
a  "  school  "  as  he  starts  a  "  revue  ";  and  these 
hasty  people  are  in  France  often  found  among 
the  people  who  last.  In  modern  England 
we  have  gained,  more  than  we  think  perhaps, 
from  the  accidents  of  neighbourhood  that  set 
Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  walking  and  talk- 
ing together.  As  it  was  England,  and  one  of 
them  v/as  Wordsworth,  they  met  in  Cumber- 
land; in  London  we  have  had  nothing  like 
the  time  of  Victor  Hugo,  when  Baudelaire  and 
Gautier  and  Gerard  de  Nerval  and  men  of  ob- 
scure and  vagabond  genius  made  Paris  vital, 
a  part  of  themselves,  a  form  of  creative  litera- 
ture. That  is  what  London  has  in  itself  the 
genius,  the  men  and  the  material,  to  be;  but 
of  the  men  of  our  time  only  Henley  and  John 
Davidson  have  loved  it  or  struck  music  out 
of  it. 

If  we  had  only  had  a  Walt  Whitman  for 
London!  Whitman  is  one  of  the  voices  of  the 
earth,  and  it  is  only  in  Whitman  that  the 
paving-stones  really  speak,  with  a  voice  as 
authentic  as  the  voice  of  the  hills.  He  knew 
no  distinction  between  what  is  called  the  work 
of  nature  and  what  is  the  work  of  men.    He 

47 


left  out  nothing,  and  what  still  puzzles  us  is 
the  blind,  loving,  embracing  way  in  which  he 
brings  crude  names  and  things  into  his  vision, 
the  name  of  a  trade,  a  street,  a  territory,  no 
matter  what  syllables  it  might  carry  along  with 
it.  He  created  a  vital  poetry  of  cities;  it  was 
only  a  part  of  what  he  did;  but  since  Whit- 
man there  is  no  gainsaying  it  any  longer. 

When  I  came  to  London,  I  knew  nothing  of 
the  great  things  that  Whitman  had  done,  or 
that  it  was  possible  to  do  them  in  such  a  way; 
but  I  had  my  own  feeling  for  London,  my 
own  point  of  view  there,  and  I  found  myself 
gradually  trying  to  paint,  or  to  set  to  music, 
to  paint  in  music,  perhaps,  those  sensations 
which  London  awakened  in  me.  I  was  only 
trying  to  render  what  I  saw  before  me,  what 
I  felt,  and  to  make  my  art  out  of  living  ma- 
terial. "  Books  made  out  of  books  pass  away  " 
was  a  sentence  I  never  forgot,  and  my  appli- 
cation of  it  was  direct  and  immediate. 

I  have  always  been  curious  of  sensations, 
and  above  all  of  those  which  seemed  to  lead 
one  into  "  artificial  paradises "  not  within 
everybody's  reach.  It  took  me  some  time  to 
find  out  that  every  "  artificial  paradise "  is 
within  one's  own  soul,  somewhere  among 
one's  own  dreams,   and   that  haschisch  is  a 

48 


poor  substitute  for  the  imagination.  The 
mystery  of  all  the  intoxicants  fascinated  me, 
and  drink,  which  had  no  personal  appeal  to 
me,  which  indeed  brought  me  no  pleasures, 
found  me  endlessly  observant  of  its  powers, 
effects,  and  variations. 

Many  of  my  friends  drank,  and  I  was  forced 
to  become  acquainted  with  the  different  forms 
which  liquor  could  take,  so  that  I  could  almost 
label  them  in  their  classes.  Thus  one,  whom 
I  will  call  A.,  drank  copiously,  continually,  all 
drinks,  for  pleasure:  he  could  carry  so  much 
so  steadily  that  he  sometimes  passed  his  limit 
without  knowing  it:  not  that  he  minded  pass- 
ing the  limit,  but  he  liked  to  be  conscious  of 
it.  B.  drank  to  become  unconscious,  he  passed 
his  limit  rapidly,  and  became  first  apologetic, 
then  quarrelsome.  His  friend  C,  a  man  abs- 
tract in  body  and  mind,  who  muttered  in 
Greek  when  he  was  least  conscious  of  himself, 
and  sat  with  imperturbable  gravity,  drinking 
like  an  ascetic,  until  his  head  fell  without 
warning  on  the  table,  seemed  to  compete  with 
B.  in  how  to  finish  soonest  with  a  life  which 
he  had  no  desire  to  get  rid  of.  I  do  not  think 
he  ever  got  any  pleasure  out  of  drinking:  he 
would  sit  up  over  night  with  absinthe  and 
cigarettes  in  order  to  be  awake  to  attend  early 

49  H 


mass;  but  though  his  will  was  strong  enough 
for  that,  the  habit  was  stronger  than  his  will, 
and  he  seemed  like  one  condemned  to  that 
form  of  suicide  without  desire  or  choice  in  the 
matter.  D.  drank  for  pleasure,  but  he  was 
scrupulous  in  what  he  drank,  and  would  take 
menthe  verte  for  its  colour,  absinthe  because 
it  lulled  him  with  vague  dreams,  ether  because 
it  could  be  taken  on  strawberries.  I  remember 
his  telling  me  exactly  what  it  feels  like  to  have 
delirium  tremens,  and  he  told  it  minutely,  self- 
pityingly,  but  with  a  relish;  not  Avithout  a 
melancholy  artistic  pride  in  the  sensations, 
their  strangeness,  and  the  fact  that  he  should 
have  been  the  victim. 

There  were  others ;  there  was  even  one  who 
cured  himself  in  some  miraculous  way,  and 
could  see  his  friends  drink  champagne  at  his 
expense,  while  he  drank  soda-water.  All  these 
I  wondered  at  and  fancied  that  I  understood. 
I  admit  that  I  was  the  more  interested  in 
these  men  because  they  were  living  in  the 
way  I  call  artificial.  I  never  thought  anyone 
the  better  for  being  a  spendthrift  of  any  part 
of  his  energies,  but  I  certainly  often  found 
him  more  interesting  than  those  who  were  not 
spendthrifts. 

I  also  found  a  peculiar  interest  in  another 

so 


part  of  what  is  artificial,  properly  artificial, 
in  London.  A  city  is  no  part  of  nature,  and 
one  may  choose  among  the  many  ways  in 
which  something  peculiar  to  walls  and  roofs 
and  artificial  lighting,  is  carried  on.  All  com- 
merce and  all  industries  have  their  share  in 
taking  us  further  from  nature  and  further  from 
our  needs,  as  they  create  about  us  unnatural 
conditions  which  are  really  what  develop  in 
us  these  new,  extravagant,  really  needless 
needs.  And  the  whole  night-world  of  the 
stage  is,  in  its  way,  a  part  of  the  very  soul 
of  cities.  That  lighted  gulf,  before  which  the 
footlights  are  the  flaming  stars  between  world 
and  world,  shows  the  city  the  passions  and 
that  beauty  which  the  soul  of  man  in  cities  is 
occupied  in  weeding  out  of  its  own  fruitful 
and  prepared  soil. 

That  is,  the  theatres  are  there  to  do  so,  they 
have  no  reason  for  existence  if  they  do  not  do 
so;  but  for  the  most  part  they  do  not  do  so. 
The  English  theatre  with  its  unreal  realism 
and  its  unimaginative  pretences  towards  poetry 
left  me  untouched  and  unconvinced.  I  found 
the  beauty,  the  poetry,  that  I  wanted  only  in 
two  theatres  that  were  not  looked  upon  as 
theatres,  the  Alhambra  and  the  Empire.  The 
ballet  seemed  to  me  the  subtlest  of  the  visible 

51 


arts,  and  dancing  a  more  significant  speech 
than  words.    I  could  ahnost  have  said  seri- 
ously, as  Verlaine  once  said  in  jest,  coming 
away  from  the  Alhambra:    "J'aime   Shake- 
speare,  mais   .   .  .   j'aime  mieux  le  ballet!" 
Why  is  it  that  one  can  see  a  ballet  fifty  times, 
always  with  the  same  sense  of  pleasure,  while 
the  most  absorbing  play  becomes  a  little  tedi- 
ous after  the  third  time  of  seeing?    For  one 
thing,  because  the  difference  between  seeing  a 
play  and  seeing  a  ballet  is  just  the  difference 
between  reading  a  book  and  looking  at  a  pic- 
ture.   One  returns  to  a  picture  as  one  returns 
to  nature,  for  a  delight  which,  being  purely 
of  the  senses,   never  tires,  never  distresses, 
never  varies.    To  read  a  book  even  for  the 
first  time,  requires  a  certain  effort.    The  book 
must  indeed  be  exceptional  that  can  be  read 
three  or  four  times,  and  no  book  was  ever 
written  that  could  be  read  three  or  four  times 
in  succession.    A  ballet  is  simply  a  picture  in 
movement.    It  is  a  picture  where  the  imitation 
of  nature  is  given  by  nature  itself;  where  the 
figures  of  the  composition  are  real,  and  yet, 
by  a  very  paradox  of  travesty,  have  a  delight- 
ful, deliberate  air  of  unreality.    It  is  a  picture 
where  the  colours  change,  re-combine,  before 
one's  eyes;  where  the  outlines  melt  into  one 

52 


another,  emerge,  and  are  again  lost,  in  the 
kaleidoscopic  movement  of  the  dance.  Here 
we  need  tease  ourselves  with  no  philosophies, 
need  endeavour  to  read  none  of  the  riddles  of 
existence ;  may  indeed  give  thanks  to  be  spared 
for  one  hour  the  imbecility  of  human  speech. 
After  the  tedium  of  the  theatre,  where  we  are 
called  on  to  interest  ourselves  in  the  improbable 
fortunes  of  uninteresting  people,  how  welcome 
is  the  relief  of  a  spectacle  which  professes  to 
be  no  more  than  merely  beautiful ;  which  gives 
us,  in  accomplished  dancing,  the  most  beauti- 
ful human  sight;  which  provides,  in  short,  the 
one  escape  into  fairy-land  which  is  permitted 
by  that  tyranny  of  the  real  which  is  the  worst 
tyranny  of  modern  life. 

The  most  magical  glimpse  I  ever  caught  of 
a  ballet  was  from  the  road  in  front,  from  the 
other  side  of  the  road,  one  night  when  two 
doors  were  suddenly  thrown  open  as  I  was 
passing.  In  the  moment's  interval  before  the 
doors  closed  again,  I  saw,  in  that  odd,  un- 
expected way,  over  the  heads  of  the  audience, 
far  off  in  a  sort  of  blue  mist,  the  whole  stage, 
its  brilliant  crowd  drawn  up  in  the  last  pose, 
just  as  the  curtain  was  beginning  to  go  down. 
It  stamped  itself  in  my  brain,  an  impression 
caught  just  at  the  perfect  moment,  by  some 

53 


rare  felicity  of  chance.  But  that  is  not  an 
impression  that  can  be  repeated.  For  the  most 
part  I  like  to  see  my  illusions  clearly,  recog- 
nizing them  as  illusions,  and  so  heightening 
their  charm.  I  liked  to  see  a  ballet  from  the 
wings,  a  spectator,  but  in  the  midst  of  the 
magic.  To  see  a  ballet  from  the  wings  is  to 
lose  all  sense  of  proportion,  all  knowledge  of 
the  piece  as  a  whole,  but,  in  return,  it  is  fruit- 
ful in  happy  accidents,  in  momentary  points 
of  view,  in  chance  felicities  of  light  and  shade 
and  movement.  It  is  almost  to  be  in  the  per- 
formance oneself,  and  yet  passive,  with  the 
leisure  to  look  about  one.  You  see  the  reverse 
of  the  picture:  the  girls  at  the  back  lounging 
against  the  set  scenes,  turning  to  talk  with 
someone  at  the  side;  you  see  how  lazily  some 
of  them  are  moving,  and  how  mechanical  and 
irregular  are  the  motions  that  flow  into  rhythm 
when  seen  from  the  front.  Now  one  is  in  the 
centre  of  a  joking  crowd,  hurrying  from  the 
dressing-rooms  to  the  stage;  now  the  same 
crowd  returns,  charging  at  full  speed  between 
the  scenery,  everyone  trying  to  reach  the 
dressing-room  stairs  first.  And  there  is  the 
constant  travelling  of  scenery,  from  which  one 
has  a  series  of  escapes,  as  it  bears  down  un- 
expectedly in  some  new  direction.    The  ballet 

54 


half  seen  in  the  centre  of  the  stage,  seen  in 
sections,  has,  in  the  glimpses  that  can  be 
caught  of  it,  a  contradictory  appearance  of 
mere  nature  and  of  absolute  unreality.  And 
beyond  the  footlights,  on  the  other  side  of  the 
orchestra,  one  can  see  the  boxes  near  the  stalls, 
the  men  standing  by  the  bar,  an  angle  cut 
sharply  off  from  the  stalls,  with  the  light  full 
on  the  faces,  the  intent  eyes,  the  grey  smoke 
curling  up  from  the  cigarettes:  a  Degas,  in 
short. 

And  there  is  a  charm,  which  I  cannot  think 
wholly  imaginary  or  factitious,  in  that  form 
of  illusion  which  is  known  as  make-up.  To  a 
plain  face,  it  is  true,  make-up  only  intensifies 
plainness;  for  make-up  does  but  give  colour 
and  piquancy  to  what  is  already  in  a  face,  it 
adds  nothing  new.  But  to  a  face  already 
charming,  how  becoming  all  this  is,  what  a 
new  kind  of  exciting  savour  it  gives  to  that 
real  charm!  It  has,  to  the  remnant  of  Puritan 
conscience  or  consciousness  that  is  the  heritage 
of  us  all,  a  certain  sense  of  dangerous  wicked- 
ness, the  delight  of  forbidden  fruit.  The  very 
phrase,  painted  women,  has  come  to  have  an 
association  of  sin,  and  to  have  put  paint  on 
her  cheeks,  though  for  the  innocent  necessities 
of  her  profession,  gives  to  a  woman  a  kind  of 

55 


symbolic  corruption.  At  once  she  seems  to 
typify  the  sorceries,  and  entanglements  of  what 
is  most  deliberately  enticing  in  her  sex: 

"  Femina  dulce  malum,  pariter  favus  atque  venenum — " 

with  all  that  is  most  subtle,  least  like  nature, 
in  her  power  to  charm.  Maquillage,  to  be 
attractive,  must  of  course  be  unnecessary.  As 
a  disguise  for  age  or  misfortune,  it  has  no 
interest.  But,  of  all  places,  on  the  stage,  and, 
of  all  people,  on  the  cheeks  of  young  people; 
there,  it  seems  to  me  that  make-up  is  in- 
tensely fascinating,  and  its  recognition  is  of 
the  essence  of  my  delight  in  a  stage  perform- 
ance. I  do  not  for  a  moment  want  really  to 
believe  in  what  I  see  before  me;  to  believe  that 
those  wigs  are  hair,  that  grease-paint  a  blush; 
any  more  than  I  want  really  to  believe  that 
the  actor  who  has  just  crossed  the  stage  in 
his  everyday  clothes  has  turned  into  an  actual 
King  when  he  puts  on  clothes  that  look  like 
a  King's  clothes.  I  know  that  a  delightful 
imposition  is  being  practised  upon  me;  that 
I  am  to  see  fairy-land  for  a  while;  and  to  me 
all  that  glitters  shall  be  gold. 

The  ballet  in  particular,  but  also  the  whole 
surprising  life  of  the  music  halls,  took  hold  of 
me  with  the  charm  of  what  was  least  real 

56 


among  the  pompous  and  distressing  unrealities 
of  a  great  city.  And  some  form  I  suppose  of 
that  instinct  which  has  created  the  gladiatorial 
shows  and  the  bull-fight  made  me  fascinated 
by  the  faultless  and  fatal  art  of  the  acrobat, 
who  sets  his  life  in  the  wager,  and  wins  the 
wager  by  sheer  skill,  a  triumph  of  fine  shades. 
That  love  of  fine  shades  took  me  angrily  past 
the  spoken  vulgarities  of  most  music-hall  sing- 
ing (how  much  more  priceless  do  they  make 
the  silence  of  dancing!)  to  that  one  great  art 
of  fine  shades,  made  up  out  of  speech  just 
lifted  into  song,  which  has  been  revealed  to 
us  by  Yvette  Guilbert. 

I  remember  when  I  first  heard  her  in  Paris, 
and  tried,  vainly  at  the  time,  to  get  the  English 
managers  to  bring  her  over  to  London.  She 
sang  "  Sainte  Galette,"  and  as  I  listened  to 
the  song  I  felt  a  cold  shiver  run  down  my 
back,  that  shiver  which  no  dramatic  art  except 
that  of  Sarah  Bernhardt  had  ever  given  me. 
It  was  not  this  that  I  was  expecting  to  find 
in  the  thin  woman  with  the  long  black  gloves. 
I  had  heard  that  her  songs  were  immoral,  and 
that  her  manner  was  full  of  underhand  inten- 
tion. What  I  found  was  a  moral  so  poignant, 
so  human,  that  I  could  scarcely  endure  the 
pity  of  it,  it  made  me  feel  that  I  was  wicked, 

57.  I 


not  that  she  was;  I,  to  have  looked  at  these 
dreadfully  serious  things  lightly.  Later  on, 
in  London,  I  heard  her  sing  "La  Soularde," 
that  song  in  which,  as  Goncourt  notes  in  his 
journal,  "  la  diseuse  de  chansonnettes  se  revMe 
comme  une  grande,  une  tr6s  grande  actrice 
tragique,  vous  mettant  au  coeur  une  con- 
striction angoisseuse."  It  is  about  an  old 
drunken  woman,  whom  the  children  follow 
and  laugh  at  in  the  streets.  Yvette  imitates 
her  old  waggling  head,  her  tottering  walk,  her 
broken  voice,  her  little  sudden  furies,  her 
miserable  resignation;  she  suggests  all  this, 
almost  without  moving,  by  the  subtlest  pan- 
tomime, the  subtlest  inflections  of  voice  and 
face,  and  she  thrills  you  with  the  grotesque 
pathos  of  the  whole  situation,  with  the  intense 
humanity  of  it.  I  imagine  such  a  situation 
rendered  by  an  English  music-hall  singer! 
Imagine  the  vulgarity,  the  inhumanity,  of  the 
sort  of  beery  caricature  that  we  should  get,  in 
place  of  this  absolutely  classic  study  in  the 
darker  and  more  sordid  side  of  life.  The  art 
of  Yvette  Guilbert  is  always  classic;  it  has 
restraint,  form,  dignity,  in  its  wildest  licence. 
Its  secret  is  its  expressiveness,  and  the  secret 
of  that  expressiveness  lies  perhaps  largely  in 
its  attention  to  detail.   Others  are  content  with 

58 


making  an  effect,  say  twice,  in  the  course  of 
a  song.  Yvette  Guilbert  insists  on  getting  the 
full  meaning  out  of  every  line,  but  quietly, 
without  emphasis,  as  if  in  passing;  and,  with 
her,  to  grasp  a  meaning  is  to  gain  an  effect. 

There  was  the  one  great  artist  of  that  world 
which,  before  I  could  apprehend  it,  had  to  be 
reflected  back  to  me  as  in  some  bewildering 
mirror.  It  was  out  of  mere  curiosity  that  I 
had  found  my  way  into  that  world,  into  that 
mirror,  but,  once  there,  the  thing  became 
material  for  me.  I  tried  to  do  in  verse  some- 
thing of  what  Degas  had  done  in  painting.  I 
was  conscious  of  transgressing  no  law  of  art 
in  taking  that  scarcely  touched  material  for 
new  uses.  Here,  at  least,  was  a  dScor  which 
appealed  to  me,  and  which  seemed  to  me  full 
of  strangeness,  beauty,  and  significance.  I 
still  think  that  there  is  a  poetry  in  this  world 
of  illusion,  not  less  genuine  of  its  kind  than 
that  more  easily  apprehended  poetry  of  a 
world,  so  little  more  real,  that  poets  have 
mostly  turned  to.  It  is  part  of  the  poetry  of 
cities,  and  it  waits  for  us  in  London. 


59 


V 

A  CITY  is  characterized  by  its  lights,  and 
it  is  to  its  lights,  acting  on  its  continual 
mist,  that  London  owes  much  of  the  mystery 
of  its  beauty.  On  a  winter  afternoon  every 
street  in  London  becomes  mysterious.  You 
see  even  the  shops  through  a  veil,  people  are 
no  longer  distinguishable  as  persons,  but  are 
a  nimble  flock  of  shadows.  Lights  travel  and 
dance  through  alleys  that  seem  to  end  in  dark- 
ness. Every  row  of  gas  lamps  turns  to  a  trail 
of  fire;  fiery  stars  shoot  and  flicker  in  the 
night.  Night  becomes  palpable,  and  not  only 
an  absence  of  the  light  of  day. 

The  most  beautiful  lighting  of  a  city  is  the 
lighting  of  one  street  in  Rome  by  low-swung 
globes  of  gas  that  hang  like  oranges  down  the 
Via  Nazionale,  midway  between  the  houses. 
In  London  we  light  casually,  capriciously, 
everyone  at  his  own  will,  and  so  there  are 
blinding  shafts  at  one  step  and  a  pit  of  dark- 
ness at  the  next,  and  it  is  an  adventure  to 
follow  the  lights  in  any  direction,  the  lights 

60 


are  all  significant  and  mean  some  place  of 
entertainment  or  the  ambition  of  some  shop- 
keeper. They  draw  one  by  the  mere  curiosity 
to  find  out  why  they  are  there,  what  has  set 
them  signalling.  And,  as  you  walk  beyond  or 
aside  from  the  shops,  all  these  private  illumi- 
nations are  blotted  out,  and  the  dim,  sufficing 
street-gas  of  the  lamp-posts  takes  their  place. 
The  canals,  in  London,  have  a  mysterious 
quality,  made  up  of  sordid  and  beautiful  ele- 
ments, now  a  black  trail,  horrible,  crawling 
secretly;  now  a  sudden  opening,  as  at  Maida 
Vale,  between  dull  houses,  upon  the  sky.  At 
twilight  in  winter  the  canal  smokes  and  flares, 
a  long  line  of  water  with  its  double  row  of 
lamps,  dividing  the  land.  From  where  Brown- 
ing lived  for  so  many  years  there  is  an  aspect 
which  might  well  have  reminded  him  of  Venice. 
The  canal  parts,  and  goes  two  ways,  broaden- 
ing to  almost  a  lagoon,  where  trees  droop  over 
the  water  from  a  kind  of  island,  with  rocky 
houses  perched  on  it.  You  see  the  curve  of  a 
bridge,  formed  by  the  shadow  into  a  pure 
circle,  and  lighted  by  the  reflection  of  a  gas- 
lamp  in  the  water  beyond;  and  the  dim  road 
opposite  following  the  line  of  the  canal,  might 
be  a  calle;  only  the  long  hull  of  a  barge  lying 
there  is  not  Venetian  in  shape,  and,  decidedly, 

6i 


the  atmosphere  is  not  Venetian.  Verlaine,  not 
knowing,  I  think,  that  Browning  lived  there, 
made  a  poem  about  the  canal,  which  he  dated 
"  Paddington."  It  is  one  of  his  two  "  Streets," 
and  it  begins:  "  O  la  riviere  dans  la  rue,"  and 
goes  on  to  invoke  "  I'eau  jaune  comme  une 
morte,"  with  nothing  to  reflect  but  the  fog. 
The  barges  crawl  past  with  inexpressible  slow- 
ness ;  coming  out  slowly  after  the  horse  and 
the  rope  from  under  the  bridge,  with  a  woman 
leaning  motionless  against  the  helm,  and  drift- 
ing on  as  if  they  were  not  moving  at  all. 

On  the  river  the  lights  are  always  at  work 
building  fairy-palaces;  wherever  there  are  trees 
they  wink  like  stars  through  drifting  cloud, 
and  the  trees  become  oddly  alive,  with  a  more 
restless  life  than  their  life  by  day.  I  have 
seen  a  plain  churchyard  with  its  straight  grave- 
stones turn  on  a  winter  afternoon  into  a  sea 
of  white  rocks,  with  vague  rosy  shore  lights 
beyond.  But  it  is  the  fog  which  lends  itself 
to  the  supreme  London  decoration,  collabor- 
ating with  gaslight  through  countless  trans- 
formations, from  the  white  shroud  to  the  yellow 
blanket,  until  every  gas-lamp  is  out,  and  you 
cannot  see  a  torch  a  yard  beyond  your  feet. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  world  quite  like  a 
London  fog,  though  the  underground  railway 

62 


stations  in  the  days  of  steam  might  have  pre- 
pared us  for  it  and  Dante  has  described  it  in 
the  "  Inferno  "  when  he  speaks  of  the  banks  of 
a  pit  in  hell,  "  crusted  over  with  a  mould  from 
the  vapour  below,  which  cakes  upon  them,  and 
battles  with  eye  and  nose."  Foreigners  praise 
it  as  the  one  thing  in  which  London  is  unique. 
They  come  to  London  to  experience  it.  It  is 
as  if  one  tried  the  experience  of  drowning  or 
suffocating.  It  is  a  penalty  worse  than  any 
Chinese  penalty.  It  stifles  the  mind  as  well 
as  choking  the  body.  It  comes  on  slowly  and 
stealthily,  picking  its  way,  choosing  its  direc- 
tion, leaving  contemptuous  gaps  in  its  course ; 
then  it  settles  down  like  a  blanket  of  solid 
smoke,  which  you  can  feel  but  not  put  from 
you.  The  streets  turn  putrescent,  the  gas- 
lamps  hang  like  rotting  fruit,  you  are  in  a 
dark  tunnel,  in  which  the  lights  are  going 
out,  and  beside  you,  unseen,  there  is  a  roar 
and  rumble,  interrupted  with  sharp  cries,  a 
stopping  of  wheels  and  a  beginning  of  the 
roar  and  rumble  over  again.  You  walk  like 
a  blind  man,  fumbling  with  his  staff  at  the 
edge  of  the  pavement.  Familiar  turnings, 
which  you  fancied  you  could  follow  blindfold, 
deceive  you,  and  you  are  helpless  if  you  go 
two  yards  out  of  your  course.    The  grime 

63 


blackens  your  face,  your  eyes  smart,  your 
throat  is  as  if  choked  with  dust.  You  breathe 
black  foulness  and  it  enters  into  you  and  con- 
taminates you. 

And  yet,  how  strange,  inexplicable,  mys- 
teriously impressive  is  this  masque  of  shadows! 
It  is  the  one  wholly  complete  transformation 
of  the  visible  world,  the  one  darkness  which 
is  really  visible,  the  one  creation  of  at  least 
the  beauty  of  horror  which  has  been  made  by 
dirt,  smoke,  and  cities. 

Yet  the  eternal  smoke  of  London  lies  in 
wait  for  us,  not  only  in  the  pestilence  of 
chimneys,  but  rising  violently  out  of  the  earth, 
in  a  rhetoric  of  its  own.  There  are  in  London 
certain  gaps  or  holes  in  the  earth,  which  are 
like  vent-holes,  and  out  of  these  openings  its 
inner  ferment  comes  for  a  moment  to  the 
surface.  One  of  them  is  at  Chalk  Farm  Station. 
There  is  a  gaunt  cavernous  doorway  leading 
underground,  and  this  doorway  faces  three 
roads  from  the  edge  of  a  bridge.  The  bridge 
crosses  an  abyss  of  steam,  which  rises  out  of 
depths  like  the  depths  of  a  boiling  pot,  only 
it  is  a  witches'  pot  of  noise  and  fire;  and 
pillars  and  pyramids  of  smoke  rise  continu- 
ally out  of  it,  and  there  are  hoarse  cries, 
screams,  a  clashing  and  rattling,  the  sound 

64 


as  of  a  movement  which  struggles  and  cannot 
escape,  like  the  coiling  of  serpents  twisting 
together  in  a  pit.  Their  breath  rises  in  clouds, 
and  drifts  voluminously  over  the  gap  of  the 
abyss ;  catching  at  times  a  ghastly  colour  from 
the  lamplight.  Sometimes  one  of  the  snakes 
seems  to  rise  and  sway  out  of  the  tangle,  a 
column  of  yellow  blackness.  Multitudes  of 
red  and  yellow  eyes  speckle  the  vague  and 
smoky  darkness,  out  of  which  rise  domes  and 
roofs  and  chimneys;  and  a  few  astonished 
trees  lean  over  the  mouth  of  the  pit,  sucking 
up  draughts  of  smoke  for  air. 


65  K 


VI 

Is  there  any  city  in  which  life  and  the  con- 
ditions of  life  can  be  more  abject  than  in 
London,  any  city  in  which  the  poor  are  more 
naturally  unhappy,  and  less  able  to  shake  off 
or  come  through  their  poverty  into  any  natural 
relief?  Those  sordid  splendours  of  smoke  and 
dirt  which  may  be  so  fine  as  aspects,  mean 
something  which  we  can  only  express  by  the 
English  word  squalor;  they  mean  the  dishu- 
manising  of  innumerable  people  who  have  no 
less  right  than  ourselves  to  exist  naturally.  I 
will  take  one  road,  which  I  know  well,  and 
which  everyone  who  lives  in  London  must 
know  somewhat,  for  it  is  a  main  artery,  Edg- 
ware  Road,  as  a  parable  of  what  I  mean.  No- 
where in  London  is  there  more  material  for  a 
comparative  study  in  living. 

Edgware  Road  begins  proudly  in  the  West 
End  of  London,  sweeping  off  in  an  emphatic 
curve  from  the  railings  of  Hyde  Park,  be- 
yond the  Marble  Arch ;  it  grows  meaner  before 
Chapel  Street,  and  from  Chapel  Street  to  the 

66 


flower-shanty  by  the  canal,  where  Maida  Vale 
goes  down  hill,  it  seems  to  concentrate  into  it- 
self all  thesordidness  of  London.  Walkingout- 
ward  from  Chapel  Street,  on  the  right-hand  side 
of  the  road,  you  plunge  instantly  into  a  dense, 
parching,  and  enveloping  smell,  made  up  of 
stale  fish,  rotting  vegetables,  and  the  must  of 
old  clothes.  The  pavement  is  never  clean;  bits 
of  torn  paper,  fragments  of  cabbage  leaves, 
the  rind  of  fruit,  the  stalks  of  flowers,  the  litter 
swept  away  from  the  front  of  shops  and  linger- 
ing on  its  way  to  the  gutter,  drift  to  and  fro 
under  one's  feet,  moist  with  rain  or  greased  with 
mud.  As  one  steps  out  of  the  way  of  a  slimy 
greyness  on  the  ground,  one  brushes  against 
a  coat  on  which  the  dirt  has  caked  or  a  skirt 
which  it  streaks  damply.    Women  in  shawls, 
with   untidy  hair,  turn  down   into  the  road 
from  all  the  side  streets,  and  go  in  and  out 
of  the  shops.    They  carry  baskets,  bags,  and 
parcels  wrapped  in  newspapers;  grease  oozes 
through  the  paper,  smearing  it  with  printer's 
ink  as  it  melts.    They  push  perambulators  in 
front  of  them,  in  which  children  with  smeared 
faces  pitch  and  roll;  they  carry  babies  under 
their  shawls.    Men  with  unshaven  faces,  hold- 
ing short  clay  pipes  between  their  teeth,  walk 
shamblingly  at  their  side;  the  men's  clothes 

67 


are  discoloured  with  time  and  weather,  and 
hang  loosely  about  them,  as  if  they  had  been 
bought  ready-made;  they  have  dirty  scarves 
knotted  round  their  necks,  and  they  go  along 
without  speaking.  Men  with  thread-bare  frock 
coats,  ill-fitting  and  carefully  brushed,  pass 
nervously,  with  white  faces  and  thin  fingers. 
Heavy  men  with  whips  in  their  hands,  thin, 
clean-shaven  men  in  short  coats  and  riding 
gaiters,  lounge  in  front  of  the  horse-dealer's 
across  the  road,  or  outside  dusty  shops  with 
bundles  of  hay  and  sacks  of  bran  in  their  door- 
ways. 

Here  and  tliere  a  gaudy  sheet  slung  across 
a  window  announces  a  fat  woman  on  show,  or 
a  collection  of  waxworks  with  the  latest  mur- 
der; flags  and  streamers,  daubed  with  ragged 
lettering,  hang  out  from  the  upper  windows. 
At  intervals,  along  the  pavement,  there  are 
girls  offering  big  bunches  of  white  and  yellow 
flowers ;  up  the  side  streets  there  are  barrows 
of  plants  and  ferns  and  flowers  in  pots;  and 
the  very  odour  of  the  flowers  turns  sickly,  as 
the  infection  of  the  air  sucks  it  up  and  mingles 
it  with  the  breath  and  sweat  of  the  people  and 
the  ancient  reek  of  clothes  that  have  grown  old 
upon  unwashed  bodies. 

Sometimes  a  pavement  artist   brings   his 

68 


pictures  with  him  on  a  square  canvas,  and 
ties  a  string  in  front  of  them,  propping  them 
against  the  wall,  and  sits  on  the  ground  at  one 
end,  with  his  cap  in  his  hand.  At  regular  in- 
tervals a  Punch  and  Judy  comes  to  one  of  the 
side  streets,  just  in  from  the  road,  a  little 
melancholy  white  dog  with  a  red  ruff  about 
its  neck  barks  feebly  as  the  puppets  flap  their 
noses  in  its  face.  On  Sundays  the  Salvation 
Army  holds  meetings,  with  flags  flying  and 
loud  brass  instruments  playing;  the  red  caps 
and  black  sun-bonnets  can  be  seen  in  the 
hollow  midst  of  the  crowd.  Not  far  off,  men 
dressed  in  surplices  stand  beside  a  harmonium, 
with  prayer-books  in  their  hands ;  a  few  people 
listen  to  them  half-heartedly.  There  are  gener- 
ally one  or  two  Italian  women,  with  bright 
green  birds  in  their  cages,  huddled  in  the 
corner  of  doorways  and  arches,  waiting  to  tell 
fortunes.  A  blind  beggar  in  a  tall  hat  stands 
at  the  edge  of  the  curbstone ;  he  has  a  tray  of 
matches  and  boot-laces  to  sell;  he  holds  a 
stick  in  his  hand,  with  which  he  paws  ner- 
vously at  an  inch  of  pavement ;  his  heel  seeks 
the  gutter,  and  feels  its  way  up  and  down  from 
gutter  to  pavement. 

Somewhere  along  the  road  there  is  generally 
a  little  crowd;  a  horse  has  fallen,  or  a  woman 

69 


has  lost  a  penny  in  the  mud,  or  a  policeman, 
note-book  in  hand,  is  talking  to  a  cabdriver 
who  has  upset  a  bicycle.  Two  women  are 
quarrelling;  they  tear  at  the  handle  of  a  per- 
ambulator in  which  two  babies  sit  and  smile 
cheerfully.  Two  men  grapple  with  each  other 
in  the  middle  of  the  road,  almost  under  the 
horses  of  the  omnibus;  the  driver  stops  his 
horses,  so  as  not  to  run  them  down.  A  coarse, 
red-faced  woman  of  fifty  drags  an  old  woman 
by  the  arm ;  she  is  almost  too  old  to  walk,  and 
she  totters  and  spreads  out  her  arms  helplessly 
as  the  other  pulls  at  her;  her  head  turns  on 
her  shoulder,  looking  out  blindly,  the  mouth 
falling  open  in  a  convulsive  grimace,  the  whole 
face  eaten  away  with  some  obscure  suffering 
which  she  is  almost  past  feeling.  A  barrel- 
organ  plays  violently;  some  youths  stare  at 
the  picture  of  the  fat,  half-naked  lady  on  the 
front  of  the  instrument;  one  or  two  children 
hold  out  their  skirts  in  both  hands  and  begin 
to  dance  to  the  tune. 

On  Saturday  night  the  Road  is  lined  with 
stalls;  naphtha  flames  burn  over  every  stall, 
flaring  away  from  the  wind,  and  lighting  up 
the  faces  that  lean  towards  them  from  the 
crowd  on  the  pavement.  There  are  stalls  with 
plants,   cheap  jewelry,   paper  books,   scarves 

70 


and  braces,  sweets,  bananas,  ice-cream  bar- 
rows, weighing-machines  ;  long  rows  of  rab- 
bits hang  by  their  trussed  hind  legs,  and  a 
boy  skins  them  rapidly  with  a  pen-knife  for 
the  buyers;  raw  lumps  of  meat  redden  and 
whiten  as  the  light  drifts  over  and  away  from 
them;  the  salesmen  cry  their  wares.  The 
shops  blaze  with  light,  displaying  their  cheap 
clothes  and  cheap  furniture  and  clusters  of 
cheap  boots.  Some  of  the  women  are  doing 
their  Saturday  night's  shopping,  but  for  the 
most  part  it  is  a  holiday  night,  and  the  people 
swarm  in  the  streets,  some  in  their  working 
clothes,  some  in  the  finery  which  they  will 
put  on  to-morrow  for  their  Sunday  afternoon 
walk  in  the  Park;  in  their  faces,  their  move- 
ments, there  is  that  unenjoying  hilarity  which 
the  end  of  the  week's  work,  the  night,  the 
week's  wages,  the  sort  of  street  fair  at  which 
one  can  buy  things  to  eat  and  to  put  on,  bring 
out  in  people  who  seem  to  live  for  the  most 
part  with  preoccupied  indifference. 

As  I  walk  to  and  fro  in  Edgware  Road,  I 
cannot  help  sometimes  wondering  why  these 
people  exist,  why  they  take  the  trouble  to  go 
on  existing.  Watch  their  faces,  and  you  will 
see  in  them  a  listlessness,  a  hard  unconcern, 
a  failure  to  be  interested,  which  speaks  equally 

71 


in  the  roving  eyes  of  the  man  who  stands 
smoking  at  the  curbstone  with  his  hands  in 
his  pockets,  and  in  the  puckered  cheeks  of  the 
woman  doing  her  shopping,  and  in  the  noisy 
laugh  of  the  youth  leaning  against  the  wall, 
and  in  the  gray,  narrow  face  of  the  child  whose 
thin  legs  are  too  tired  to  dance  when  the 
barrel-organ  plays  jigs.  Whenever  anything 
happens  in  the  streets  there  is  a  crowd  at 
once,  and  this  crowd  is  made  up  of  people 
who  have  no  pleasures  and  no  interests  of 
their  own  to  attend  to,  and  to  whom  any 
variety  is  welcome  in  the  tedium  of  their 
lives.  In  all  these  faces  you  will  see  no  beauty, 
and  you  will  see  no  beauty  in  the  clothes  they 
wear,  or  in  their  attitudes  in  rest  or  move- 
ment, or  in  their  voices  when  they  speak. 
They  are  human  beings  to  whom  nature  has 
given  no  grace  or  charm,  whom  life  has  made 
vulgar,  and  for  whom  circumstances  have  left 
no  escape  from  themselves.  In  the  climate  of 
England,  in  the  atmosphere  of  London,  on 
these  pavements  of  Edgware  Road,  there  is 
no  way  of  getting  any  simple  happiness  out 
of  natural  things,  and  they  have  lost  the  cap- 
acity for  accepting  natural  pleasures  graci- 
ously, if  such  came  to  them.  Crawling  be- 
tween heaven  and  earth  thus  miserably,  they 

72 


have  never  known  what  makes  existence  a 
practicable  art  or  a  tolerable  spectacle,  and 
they  have  infinitely  less  sense  of  the  mere  abs- 
tract human  significance  of  life  than  the  fac- 
chino  who  lies,  a  long  blue  streak  in  the  sun, 
on  the  Zattere  at  Venice,  or  the  girl  who  carries 
water  from  the  well  in  an  earthen  pitcher, 
balancing  it  on  her  head,  in  any  Spanish  street. 
Or,  instead  of  turning  to  human  beings,  in 
some  more  favorable  part  of  the  world,  go  to 
the  Zoological  Gardens  and  look  at  the  beasts 
there.  The  conditions  of  existence  are,  per- 
haps, slightly  worse  for  the  beasts;  their  cages 
are  narrow,  more  securely  barred ;  human 
curiosity  is  brought  to  bear  upon  them  with 
a  more  public  offence.  But  observe,  under  all 
these  conditions,  the  dignity  of  the  beasts, 
their  disdain,  their  indifference!  When  the 
fluttering  beribboned,  chattering  human  herd 
troops  past  them,  pointing  at  them  with  shrill 
laughter,  uneasy,  pre-occupied,  one  eye  on  the 
beasts  and  the  other  on  the  neighbour's  face 
or  frock,  they  sit  there  stolidly  in  their  cages, 
not  condescending  to  notice  their  unruly 
critics.  When  they  move,  they  move  with 
the  grace  of  natural  things,  made  rhythmical 
with  beauty  and  strong  for  ravage  and  swift 
for  flight.     They  pace  to  and   fro,   rubbing 

73  L 


themselves  against  the  bars,  restlessly;  but 
they  seem  all  on  fire  with  a  life  that  tingles 
to  the  roots  of  their  claws  and  to  the  tips  of 
their  tails,  dilating  their  nostrils  and  quiver- 
ing in  little  shudders  down  their  smooth 
flanks.  They  have  found  an  enemy  craftier 
than  they,  they  have  been  conquered  and 
carried  away  captive,  and  they  are  full  of 
smouldering  rage.  But  with  the  loss  of  liberty 
they  have  lost  nothing  of  themselves;  the  soul 
of  their  flesh  is  uncontaminated  by  humilia- 
tion. They  pass  a  mournful  existence  nobly, 
each  after  his  kind,  in  loneliness  or  in  unwill- 
ing companionship;  their  eyes  look  past  us 
without  seeing  us;  we  have  no  power  over 
their  concentration  within  the  muscles  of  their 
vivid  limbs  or  within  the  coils  of  their  subtle 
bodies. 

Humanity,  at  the  best,  has  much  to  be 
ashamed  of,  physically,  beside  the  supreme 
physical  perfection  of  the  panther  or  the  snake. 
All  of  us  look  poor  enough  creatures  as  we 
come  away  from  their  cages.  But  think  now 
of  these  men  and  women  whom  we  have  seen 
swarming  in  Edgware  Road,  of  their  vulgarity, 
their  abjectness  of  attitude  toward  life,  their 
ugliness,  dirt,  insolence,  their  loud  laughter. 
All  the  animals  except  man  have  too  much 

74 


dignity  to  laugh ;  only  man  found  out  the  way 
to  escape  the  direct  force  of  things  by  attach- 
ing a  critical  sense,  or  a  sense  of  relief,  to  a 
sound  which  is  neither  a  cackle  nor  a  whinny, 
but  which  has  something  of  those  two  in- 
articulate voices  of  nature.  As  I  passed 
through  the  Saturday  night  crowd  lately, 
between  two  opposing  currents  of  evil  smells, 
I  overheard  a  man  who  was  lurching  along 
the  pavement  say  in  contemptuous  comment: 
"Twelve  o'clock!  we  may  be  all  dead  by 
twelve  o'clock!  "  He  seemed  to  sum  up  the 
philosophy  of  that  crowd,  its  listlessness,  its 
hard  unconcern,  its  failure  to  be  interested. 
Nothing  matters,  he  seemed  to  say  for  them; 
let  us  drag  out  our  time  until  the  time  is  over, 
and  the  sooner  it  is  over  the  better. 

Life  in  great  cities  dishumanizes  humanity; 
it  envelops  the  rich  in  multitudes  of  clogging, 
costly  trifles,  and  cakes  the  poor  about  with 
ignoble  dirt  and  the  cares  of  unfruitful  labour. 
Go  into  the  country,  where  progress  and 
machines  and  other  gifts  of  the  twentieth 
century  have  not  wholly  taken  away  the 
peasant's  hand  from  the  spade  and  plough, 
or  to  any  fishing  village  on  the  coast,  and 
you  will  see  that  poverty,  even  in  England, 
can  find  some   natural    delights   in    natural 

75 


things.   You  will  find,  often  enough,  that  very 
English  quality  of  vulgarity  in  the  peasant 
who  lives  inland ;  only  the  sea  seems  to  cleanse 
vulgarity  out  of  the  English  peasant,  and  to 
brace  him  into  a  really  simple  and  refined 
dignity.    And,  after  all,  though  the  labourer 
who  turns  the  soil   is  in  unceasing  contact 
with  nature,  he  has  not  that  sting  of  danger 
to  waken  him  and  cultivate  his  senses  which 
is  never  absent  for  long  from  the  life  of  the 
fisherman.     People  who  cast  their  nets  into 
the  sea,  on  the  hazard  of  that  more  uncertain 
harvest,  have  a  gravity,  a  finished  self-reliance, 
a  kind  of  philosophy  of  their  own.   Their  eyes 
and  hands  are  trained  to  fineness  and  strength, 
they  learn  to  know  the  winds  and  clouds,  and 
they  measure  their  wits  against  them,  risking 
their  lives  on  the  surety  of  their  calculations. 
The  constant  neighbourhood  of  death  gives 
life  a  keener  savour,  they  have  no  certainty  of 
ever  opening  again  the  door  which  they  close 
behind  them  as  they  go  out  to  launch  their 
boats  under  the  stars.    Tossing  between  a 
naked  sea  and  a  naked  sky  all  night  long, 
they   have    leisure    for    many   dreams,    and 
thoughts  come  into  their  heads  which  never 
trouble  the  people  who  live  in  streets.    They 

have  all  the  visible  horizon  for  their  own. 

76 


And  the  sea  washes  clean.     In   the  steep 
Cornish  village  that  I  know  best,  I  see,  when- 
ever I  go  out,  bright  flowers  in  front  of  white 
cottages,  a  cow's  head  laid  quietly  over  a  stone 
hedge,  looking  down  on  the  road,  the  brown 
harvest  in  the  fields  that  stretch  away  beyond 
the  trees  to  the  edge  of  the  cliff,  and  then, 
further  on  towards  the  sky,  the  blue  glitter  of 
the  sea,  shining  under  sunlight,  with  great 
hills  and  palaces  of  white  clouds,  rising  up 
from  the  water  as  from  a  solid  foundation. 
The  sea  is  always  at  the  road's  end,  and  there 
is  always  a  wind  from  the  sea,  coming  sing- 
ing up  the  long  street  from  the  harbour,  and 
shouting  across  the  fields  and  whistling  in 
the  lanes.    Life  itself  seems  to  come  freshly 
into  one's  blood,  as  if  life  were  not  only  a 
going  on  with  one's  habits  and  occupations, 
but  itself  meant  something,  actually  existed. 
Everyone  I  meet  on  the  road  speaks  to  me 
as  I  pass;    their  faces  and   their  voices  are 
cheerful;    they  have  no  curiosity,   but   they 
are  ready  to  welcome  a  stranger  as  if  he  were 
someone  they  knew  already.    Time  seems  to 
pass  easily,  in  each  day's  space  between  sea 
and  sky;   the  day  has  no  tedium  for  them; 
and  they  need   go    no    further   than  to  the 
harbour  or  the  farm  for  enough  interest  to 

77 


fill  out  all  the  hours  of  the  day.  They  have 
room  to  live,  air  to  breathe;  beauty  is  natural 
to  everything  about  them.  The  dates  in  their 
churchyards  tell  you  how  long  they  have  the 
patience  to  go  on  living. 


73 


CHISWICK   PRESS:   CHARLES   WHITTINGHAM   AND  CO. 
TOOKS  COURT,    CHANCERY  LANE,    LONDON. 


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